


the shaking hands of time are your love stories

by crimson_noir



Series: The Skyscraper 'Verse [1]
Category: Ghosts of the Shadow Market Series - Sarah Rees Brennan & Cassandra Clare & Kelly Link, The Infernal Devices Series - Cassandra Clare
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst, F/M, Gen, M/M, Songfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-05
Updated: 2020-03-05
Packaged: 2021-02-28 21:27:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 25,058
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23023990
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crimson_noir/pseuds/crimson_noir
Summary: Three decades. Three people. Let’s tell a tale, and hope it never ends.
Relationships: Jem Carstairs & Tessa Gray, Jem Carstairs & Will Herondale, Jem Carstairs/Tessa Gray, Jem Carstairs/Tessa Gray/Will Herondale, Tessa Gray & Will Herondale, Tessa Gray/Will Herondale
Series: The Skyscraper 'Verse [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1678996
Comments: 12
Kudos: 24





	1. seven - seventeen

_Come up to meet you,_

_Tell you I’m sorry,_

_You don’t know how lovely you are._

It’s a quiet neighbourhood. It is like this—Tessa Gray lives with Jem Carstairs under the wing of the Branwell-Fairchilds. The Lightwoods live across the street and aren’t very nice to the Fairchilds a lot of the time. The Fairchilds are nothing if not patient.

However, this is not a tale about last names. A distant relative’s daughter of the Fairchilds lives with them: Sophie. It’s a London neighbourhood, a nice one to raise children in, subtly expensive. The Branwell-Fairchilds have children in the house, three luminous children. There is talk of being one more. This is not a tale about last names, though. It is about those children.

Tessa is seven, and adorable. Wavy brown hair, rose-pink cheeks, grey eyes that seem to be colour-changing (magic eyes, Jem calls them), and a way of pointing at words in a book and giggling. Just utterly adorable. Tessa likes slow, calming music—Edith Piaf’s a particular favourite. Her best friend in all the whole wide world is Jem: where she goes, he follows and vice versa. She’s American in the way she walks and talks and breathes, despite having lived in London for long. She’s a mystery and a miracle.

Sophie’s a beautiful girl, not a child even at just nine, so lovely it hurts to look at her, a minor goddess come to life—chocolate brown eyes too big for her face, lush brown hair curling down her shoulders, always smiling, always shining. Sophie likes cheery Barbie movies, pretty palettes, mass-produced generic party songs and she’s always perpetually nervous for some reason or the other, shaking hands and a quiet voice. (She won’t be there after some time.)

Jem Carstairs has black hair, high cheekbones and eyes so black one could drown in them. He’s eight and so calm it’s unsettling; even Tessa has her rages. He keeps them in order and likes confetti and smiles at everyone but his smiles for his best friend are brightest. He doesn’t have much of a taste in music yet; he sings Mandarin lullabies to himself in the music room when it’s empty and he looks at the violins like he wants them.

There are the others, too, but most of them aren’t of any consequence yet, and the story has to go on, doesn’t it?

*

The moment Will Herondale arrives at the house, Tessa isn’t there to greet him. She’s gone to the Lightwoods with Charlotte, to meet their (rumour says more pleasant) Lightwood cousins from the US. Jem hopes that the rumours are true—he doesn’t want Tessa stuck. If she comes back home irritable, he’s going to be the one attacked.

Jem meets Will Herondale when the boy just walks into the music room without even knocking and offers to be friends. Jem is six, of course he accepts—but Will had looked scared, like he thought Jem might say no. Jem thinks the boy is sad, but then they begin to play a very complicated game of Twister and Jem forgets.

“You’re playing Twister without me?” Sophie asks as she walks in.

“He’s playing alone?” Tessa asks incredulously, her skirt swirling around her knees. Then they see Will.

Jem smiles for some reason he cannot pinpoint. Will sits up, straightening his rumpled clothing and then a charming smile just appears on his six-year-old face.

“Hello, I’m Will Herondale.”

Jem doesn’t even try to charm, instead beaming brightly up at the girls. It’s quite a picture, the black heads of hair. They’re sitting so close they seem to fuse.

“What was the visit about, Tess?”

“I saw two grown-ups,” Tessa answers, not the answer but an answer nevertheless, “they said they just got married and I sang to them because Charlotte wanted me to and their names were long but they said I could call them Mary and Robbie. They were nice, but they looked sad. And I don’t think they were in love.”

Maryse and Robert Lightwood, the Lightwoods in the USA.

“How was Gabriel?”

Tessa hummed for a few seconds, and finally said, “He was quiet. He was nice to me. Someone had a baby and he said it wasn’t really a baby because it was three years old, but I didn’t believe him because the baby was tiny.” Sophie laughs.

Jem watches carefully, and so does Will, but then he says, “Babies are cute, Tessa,” in a very decided manner and they’re all friends and talking and playing Twister and Jem is watching. Carefully. The wallflower.

He likes Will, though, likes his dark hair and his bright blue eyes and the way he talks, an accent from a region he can’t identify too well. It’s fine, it’s all fine—Tessa can make new friends and Sophie’s a nice person anyway. Maybe they’ll all be friends. Won’t that be nice?

*

Tessa’s sitting at a window seat, reading a book—Great Expectations, for the curious—when Jem comes up to her.

“Hey, Tess,” he starts, and Tessa almost falls off because in reality, it is more of a windowsill than a window seat.

“Jem, you scared me!”

“Sorry,” he apologizes, his hair falling in his eyes, and he’s tiny, “but Will and I are going to have a sword fight, just like in the Three Musketeers.”

“Seriously?” She asks. “Dumas?”

She thinks they’re too young to be sword fighting like in the Three Musketeers, but she sighs and rolls her eyes and says, “Okay.”

Will’s out in the garden, holding a wooden stick, one of the same on the grass. He’s just swiping it inexpertly around, but he looks pretty strong to Tessa, one of the strong eleven-year old boys.

Jem, however.

Jem, even though he’s the oldest, being thirteen, has never really looked strong, not to Tessa, not in the way Will does or not even in the way princes are drawn. He is nice and kind, though. He is just really nice and if Will hurts him, Tessa will…Tessa doesn’t know what Tessa will do, really. But she’ll do something.

She doesn’t worry much, though—Will and Jem are pretty much the best of friends and they’re close enough to make Tessa jealous sometimes. Always sitting together, even in the music room, virtually inseparable. Tessa doesn’t even remember the first time she saw Will—it just feels like he’s always been there.

“What are you fighting for?” She asks them, because that is what a lady would ask when faced with a random swordfight long, long ago. Probably.

“The right to love!” Will exclaims smilingly.

“Jem’s against it?” Tessa inquires, surprised.

“No, not at all,” replies Will, laughing now, “that just sounded like a nice cause in my head. May not have thought it through.”

“You’re an idiot,” Jem grins fondly, sitting down on the grass, wooden sword laid across his lap.

“Ugh,” articulates Will with a groan, lying down on the grass, lazy in the sunlight, “It is a nice cause, which is why we aren’t fighting. Mutual agreement.”

Tessa wonders if Will somehow saw that Jem didn’t want to sword fight and just let go of the idea.

“But I want you to know, for future record,” he continues, “I won this. Tessa, you are witness.” She accepts the responsibility with a courteous bow of her head, hiding a smile.

“You win everything, forever and always,” Jem agrees, affectionate, smiling sweetly up at the sky.

Will makes an indeterminable sound. Tessa laughs. Her boys, both of them, her foolish boys.

“Sophie’s at finishing school,” she says instead, “and Will wins everything, so won’t we be bored pretty soon?”

“Nah, Tessa,” disagrees Will, eyes sparkling, “we’ll be fighting for love.”

“Why didn’t you go to fancy school, Tess?”

Jem asks good questions. The answer is simple, but the feelings attached to it are not.

“I didn’t want to go,” she answers easily, looking somewhere other than Jem to make it smoother.

“In our true and dauntless crusade for love,” Will declaims loudly, “we first have to be sure of each other. Do we love each other?”

“Yes,” replies Tessa. It doesn’t take much of her to do so.

“Of course, don’t be silly,” says Jem.

“That’s good. We will surely conquer the world!”

“Um, Fearless Leader,” interrupts Jem, “going just a little bit supervillain there.”

“Shut up,” whines Will.

Tessa lays down on the grass beside them, looking up at the sun.

“I wonder what we’ll be like when we get old.”

They stay out there for a long time. It is late when Charlotte finds them.

“You three,” she says, “get up. I have some news for you.”

They walk to the house, and Charlotte matches pace with her as Will and Jem run ahead.

“I’m sorry, Tessa, darling,” Charlotte says softly, “I know Jem means a lot to you. But we’re sending him to a special school, like Sophie. His parents wanted it. It’s called the Bone School for the Gifted. Jem will have to wear a flowy, medieval uniform and be called a Silent Brother, it’ll be so boring, Tessa, and he’ll be back in a snap, just you see…”

Tessa runs to the house, shoving past her friends, eyes stinging. Her cheeks are wet, and her eyes are red by the time she reaches her room. Better her being sent off to fancy school than Jem. Better her being _dead_ than Jem gone.

*

_I had to find you,_

_Tell you I need you,_

_Tell you I set you apart._

*

Jem looks around at the grounds that spread around the Bone School for The Gifted. There is a lot of grounds, so much so that the school itself isn’t visible. The landscaping is extraordinarily good.

“This is lovely landscaping,” he says to his companion. “All the trees, and tiny hills and whatnot. I mean, it’s really quite ins—”

“At the Bone School, we treasure perfect silence at all times, Brother Zachariah.”

“My name is James. Just putting that out there.”

The tall figure in his hooded, shapeless beige robes turns to him. Jem stamps down stubbornly upon his fear. It looks like the guy’s face has been cut up to hell, and his eyes are weird and glassy, like a blind person’s. Jem feels scared now, no point in hiding it.

“And mine used to be Andrew. Now I am a student of the Bones, Aeneas.”

Oh God, Jem’s parents have put him in a cult. Did they think it would be funny? Oh god, oh god. This is a terrible mistake and Jem just wants to go home and back to Tessa and Will, back to mock-sword fighting games because he’s sure they have real ones here and Jem is not fond of that idea. In fact, Jem wants to run all these beautifully landscaped grounds to get away from that idea.

Oh my god, he’s now to be called _Zachariah_. How terribly uncool. Will would die laughing at him, this much is certain. He trudges along the very green grass gloomily, a pace or two behind Andrew (how would you say ‘Brother Aeneas’ in proper conversation and not immediately burst into laughter), staring at the sky, which is kind of cloudy.

Then he sees the Bone School and quite immediately does not care whether his parents have put him in a cult or not. It’s a huge, castle-like building, the likes of which you don’t see anywhere except for movies. It’s all white marble. It’s very, very rich-looking. Jem hopes they have good food. He’d kill for a decent cup of tea right about now.

Oh god, maybe they want him to do that. Is this an assassin’s school? It’s even named the Bone School! And numerous bodies might be hidden anywhere in these amazingly green grounds—oh god, natural fertilizer, which is why it’s all so green. Jem’s stomach roils. He very carefully refrains from asking Andrew if he’s ever killed anybody, because it may go against their fetish for perfect silence.

Jem thinks he is going to go and vomit in a bush. In one of these lovely, lovely bushes fertilized by some guy’s rotting intestines. But that wouldn’t be dignified, so he holds it in and watches the world spin sickeningly, and finally says, “Hnnghk,” and faints. Not perfect silence, but good enough. The last thing he thinks before he does so is a rather nonsensical _ring around the roses, pocket full of posies…_

He misses Will and Tessa. Jem wakes up in what he thinks is a hospital ward, on sheets that manage to surprise him with how ludicrously soft they are. The thread count must be out of the world on these, and if they aren’t Egyptian, Jem is going to stop studying and take up a job as a rent boy. (He doesn’t know what a rent boy is, exactly—he read it in a dictionary and thought it sounded like something interesting; he’s probably wrong) He knows his fabrics. He’s proud of the fact.

A smell of herbs and flowers makes its way into his nose, and he sighs contentedly. Thank God he got nervy and fainted. This is wonderful. There is no one, absolutely no one he can see. Hospital beds stretch as far as he can see, and he wonders just how many kids are at this school.

“Epidemics used to be quite a thing when the school was first built,” says a voice, and Jem does the rational thing and immediately falls off the bed, taking the blankets and the bedsheets with him.

“It’s old, baby,” continues the voice blithely, very American, “Old as hell and hotter ‘n that sometimes.”

“Wow,” coughs Jem, impressed and on the floor, and this floor is cold _,_ and it hurts his bony lower half. And his bony upper half. “That’s quite an accent you’ve got.”

“And here I thought I was enunciating clearly for you, London boy,” the voice drawls, “I’m Chad. Or Brother Charles.”

If Jem weren’t quite so scared, and cold, and new, he would’ve howled with laughter. “Charles?”

“Yeah, and the name on my birth certificate,” Chad’s t’s are sharp and indignant, “is Chad. I have a fancier name at school than on legal documents, how stupid is that? British people, I swear. It’s a menace trying to understand ‘em.”

“I don’t know, really. I expected something worse. I became Zachariah from James.”

“You gon’ make me Cinderella, huh?”

“They would have, but I guess they saw the name Chad and were like,” Jem shakes his hair out of his eyes, grinning up at the figure who he now knows is Chad, “Let’s give him the most generic name that starts with a ‘Cha’, he’ll be impressed. No effort required for _that_ uncivilized American.”

Chad has very blonde hair and electric green eyes, almost cat-like in their vibrancy. Jem suddenly remembers that he is shy, and withdrawn and _new to this place_ as he hears the American laugh. He looks down at the frigid marble floor.

“Get on off of there, joker,” Chad extends a hand to help him up. And he cannot stop himself from saying—

“All my gratitude, Brother Charles.”

*

Tessa, caught in a rare moment, is not reading. She is brushing her hair in front of a mirror, something she thought she’d never do, ever—an act way more suited to Sophie during her sudden and inexplicable bouts of vanity than her, looking straight into her own eyes, working hard to keep her hands from trembling. _Magic eyes,_ Jem had called them. And here come the tears. She doesn’t pay heed to them even as they flow, stays focused on the movement of the brush.

God, she misses Jem. She misses herself as she used to be. She misses Will, but he’s gone for the stupid party that his friends (jocks, all of them, and she wonders how Will fits in) have invited him to. Oh, Will. They haven’t talked in a while, and Sophie’s in puppy love with Gabriel Lightwood, of all people, and she doesn’t have anyone to talk to. Even Charlotte and Henry are way more focused on themselves. Tessa hears noises, very _sexual_ noises, sometimes when she’s walking around the house late at night; she’s bored, sue her. One wouldn’t think Henry would be such a vocal man in the sack.

She blushes at her own thoughts—she discovered these bodice-ripper romances in the library, hidden but not that well, and the classification ‘bodice-ripper’ is kinda skewed, because most of the time, the heroines don’t bother with bodices _(‘Oh, ravish me, you wild stallion! Wreck that garden of delights which bears fruit only for you!’_ ), or any kind of sensible clothing.

She didn’t read a lot of those novels, but the few that she read left no space for questions. She’s not as innocent about all this as her classmates think. They tease Will about it, too, calling him such a bad influence on her pure, pure mind. It disturbs him, she knows it, knows it from the twitch in his eyebrow and the way he looks at her after, a non-verbal _sorry, but I have to deal with this_.

She doesn’t know why he has to, why he thinks those little insignificances are important in any way, shape or form. She wants to scream at him about it, sometimes. I am your best friend, Herondale, you spoilt little brat, but that doesn’t mean I always will be, stop disintegrating like wet goddamn tissue paper and be useful.

But she doesn’t. She never can.

Because she looks at him and sees a boy wrecked, utterly wrecked, because Jem left too soon, and he only comes over for one day every year and it’s devastating because she sees Will light up, and she feels herself light up, all the way up, and then when he leaves, they both surrender to the loneliness that comes from a vital part of you ripping itself off. She doesn’t know why Jem is so important to them as a whole.

She doesn’t know when she began to equate the loss of him with a missing limb. She doesn’t know when Jem became like a deity, coming down to bless his worshippers for one day. It’s very unsettling, and it’s not friendship. Maybe if she and Will had turned to each other when Jem left, they might’ve been more mentally adjusted. But that didn’t happen—one of Tessa’s greatest regrets.

Maybe in some alternate universe, where magic existed and Will and Jem were born from angels, maybe in that universe, they survived the loss of Jem. Maybe they were even happy with it as a reality. Maybe they moved past it. She shudders. She has an amazing imagination, but she can’t imagine that. She can’t entertain it as a possibility, it’ll drive her mad.

Tessa listens to the front door open, the wood slamming against the wall with a subdued bang, and thanks her stars that Charlotte, Henry and Sophie have left for the Lightwoods’ to discuss the Sophie-Gabriel engagement. They had an astonishingly sickly-sweet romance, roses and perfume, Sophie coming to talk to Tessa about ‘the glories of love’ and her perfect Prince Charming, no speedbumps at all, Gabriel turning out to be a perfect gentleman, both the families amazingly approving, all proper old-fashioned courting in a time of booty calls.

Young Tessa would’ve been charmed by all that, a story straight from her favourite novels, but now she’s gotten to the point where a sick, sick part of her hopes that it derails just before the wedding, because the way her life is going, she doesn’t think she’ll be able to believe in love, be it romantic or platonic or just that haze that she’s heard stems from lust. And it’s been only a year since Jem left. God, but she’s attached. But they can’t do anything about it now. She’s pretty sure Jem snatched a part of her when he went to his fancy school.

Will is back.

He’s standing at her bedroom door and his clothes are messed up so bad that she wonders which desperate flock of girls decided to molest him. She doesn’t look at him super closely, instead tutting at the complete disarray of his…everything. He dressed sharp for this party, some sort of costume party, he’d said, eyes bright and feverish just before he told her to leave, that he couldn’t have her around to ruin perfection.

His blue silk waistcoat, that she knows is silk only because he’d bragged about it so much when he got it, a gift on last Christmas, twin to the one they sent for Jem, is ripped and drenched with something she knows is not water, and those stains won’t be removable, or approved of by Charlotte, which means he’s just going to trash it. Like it’s irrelevant.

Tessa wants to punch him in his bloody face.

She doesn’t have the courage to look at his face, not yet, so she notes the way he’s leaning on the door frame, trying to pass it off as casual, but it’s really not. If that thing weren’t there, he would be in a faceplant, dead to the world.

She looks at the way there’s no suit jacket on his person, meaning that he just forgot it in the midst of some random party, probably gave it to some girl who fawns over him being on the football team, and will tuck it under her pillow every night, smell the remnants of his sweat before she sleeps. The suit jacket that’s twin to Jem’s, gone. God, Charlotte will be so _hurt_.

And then she looks at his face, cheeks flushed with alcohol and mouth slack, and he’s talking about things that she doesn’t care about, and he looks like her worst nightmare like this, all out of control, stupid. He’s too young to be like this. His eyes are unfocused and glazed over, obviously unhealthy, and then he tries to walk and sways very, very dangerously. His motor skills are probably distant memory. Tessa is crying again, and he’s talking about all the girls he just met and ‘got very well introduced to, if you know what I mean.’ She doesn’t want to know what he means.

Which is why she lets him crash to the floor when he finally does.

 _Goddamn it, James_.

*

Jem is lying on his bed. Jem is decidedly not thinking about the Halloween Ball. Jem is definitely not still pissed about being teased by Chad for having ‘zero game,’ just because he said he had no interest in the girls coming over from the Ferrous Finishing School for Girls.

Yeah, he’s pretty sure he likes girls, what with him thinking _she’s pretty_ and _what would it be like to kiss her_ and feeling a decided…development in his pyjamas if he thinks about that too hard at night. Sometimes, his fantasies get away from him. He tries to stop them, though, every time, so he’s forgiven. It’s the thought that counts, right?

God, he sometimes wishes he were brave. Or drunk at the right time, just the right amount, with the right person. He’s sure Will has all the girls at school just lining up for a chance to get a glimpse of him. He’s sure that Sophie dangles boys from her sharp, baby pink nails before she breaks their poor hearts.

Tessa. He’s sure Tessa’s already in love, happy and smiling her bright smile at whoever the lucky person is. He thinks about her a lot these days. He doesn’t know why, but he suspects…He’s always liked her. She’s always been the centre of something indefinite and unfathomable, close to his mind and practically a part of his heart.

Try as he might, he cannot put her out of his mind, which is part of the reason he doesn’t attend all these stupid parties—no one can equal up to his girl with the magic eyes. His angel. Jem has always known he loves her, but sometimes he feels like he’s in love with her, and that scares him, so he always turns his mind to other subjects.

There is a chill in the coming in through the windows. It does get pretty cold here if your dorm mates insist on keeping the flipping windows wide open because of their ‘ _chakras._ ’ God, Chad is sometimes too American for this world. One expects him to dress up as an overzealous eagle for the Fourth of July, breaking all the School’s rules for perfect silence, smiting everyone for being British and drinking too much tea, generally causing a student riot in the hallways (yes, he did that). It’s not generally always a bad thing, but in times like now, it really is. Because like every fifteen-year-old American hormonal male teen, Chad believes that every problem can be solved with a good old-fashioned make-out.

(Jem’s subconscious makes an irritating point that that is the belief of _most_ fifteen-year-old hormonal male teens, not just the American ones. He wants to kick his blasted subconscious in its rational, smug subconscious face.) Not every problem should be blamed on the Americans, his pale and pasty subconscious bleats. Sorry, he says to it, but my Chinese ancestors’ colonization, the tons of bags of amazing tea in American harbours, and the entire political history of the world disagree with you on that. Jem-1, Subconscious-0.

He's so dull, he thinks with a jolt. Which teen lies around in bed and mopes when his friends are all thinking about their costumes for the surely amazing party in the evening? Boring Jem, that’s who. And then he makes a Decision. He’s going to go down and have fun, too. Maybe even dance with someone. Have fun.

He’s going to go dressed as Dr Jekyll, Crazy Scientist Supreme. Dr Jekyll with a violin, because Chad said that girls ‘dig’ guys playing instruments. (“The 70s called and they want their word choice back,” Jem had snarked. In his mind, so that no one could hear it but him.)

He gets up with a jump and rummages through his wardrobe, pushing aside the flowy, impractical school robes to reveal the stuff he got from home. There’s a deep blue silk getup that Charlotte had gotten tailored for him and Will that he thinks will be perfect. It had looked good on Will, and even though they look very, very different, Jem has hope that he will not look like a complete idiot. Half an idiot would do. He slings the outfit bag over his shoulder. The boys will help, surely.

Brother Walter, Brother Patrick, Brother Edward and Brother Charles look at him as he flings open the door to the common room.

“Ay,” says Pete, “I thought you were a saint, Zach.”

“You know my real name,” Jem sighs.

“Yeah,” says Verron, grinning, “but making nicknames out of these dull identities is so much better. Would I be Walty or Wally?”

“Duh,” says Eddie, smirking.

“Children,” Chad sighs, “didn’t I just say that my boy would soon see the way of the light?”

“I’d see the way of the light too, if it looked like those chicks at Ferrous,” Pete says, very crude and happy about it, “Call themselves the Iron Sisters. I’d love to have one of those near _my_ iron—”

Chad slaps a hand over Pete’s mouth. “Brother Patrick,” he admonishes, eyes sparkling, “Don’t we maintain the _high_ est level of discipline in this dormitory?” His accent has changed completely, and Jem’s used to it. Once he had to endure an entire month of Chad’s French accent, which was very, very French. If he really sat down to think about it, it was actually sexy. God, Jem is going crazy.

“Yeah, you’re one to talk,” drawls Eddie, whose real name is _Eddie._ His legal name is a nickname. “I see what you did there with the word ‘high,’ mate.”

“I was being obvious,” Chad explains, removing his hand from Pete’s mouth when Pete licks it, _licks it_ , everyone is crazy here, “what are you worried about now, Jem?”

“Uh,” Jem says worriedly, “My outfit.”

“You’re actually going?” Eddie whoops, “We’re gonna have fun tonight!”

“I thought you were just here to tease us about the fact that we were going,” Verron says, curling a hand over a book so that he can hit Jem with it, a mere formality, not meant to hurt, “You tease. You should’ve told us—we could’ve done a matching costume.”

Jem smiles. Verron is the softest of them all.

“It would’ve been nice,” he agrees, “but Brother Patrick is adamant to go as a male stripper, and I do not think I want us to go as a strip club. I do not have the muscles for those tight tank tops.”

Verron laughs. Pete scowls. “Say what you want, boy,” he says, “Laugh it up. When I get all the girls, I’ll be sure to not give them any of your names.”

“Sharing is caring,” Eddie grins, and everyone laughs. He likes them, bawdy jokes and all. He’s sure Tessa would frown at them for some jokes but give them lopsided smiles when she thinks no one’s looking. He thinks Will would like them, too. He misses Will like hell. He strokes a hand over the blue fabric, hoping Will wears his, too. He had loved the waistcoat. Jem shows them the suit.

“Anyway, you’ll be too busy giving them lap dances,” Chad dismisses the fantasy after the customary acknowledgement, “you’ll be just fine. Now Jem. You’ve never seen the girls before, ergo, they have never seen you. They think of you as one in the crowd, utterly and completely unremarkable. They probably think you look no better than these masks we wear on a daily basis, that makes our lovely skin look cut up, marred, and they probably think your eyes are permanently glazed like those lenses we are forced to wear when we have to feel the ordeal of the blind once a month.”

Jem chuckles, wondering where he’s going with this. “They need to see your soulful face, those angelic eyes, they need to fall in love with you! It’s so easy to fall in love with you, you have no idea. So, you have to be a character out of a fairy-tale, something unachievable. No book characters. No _boring_ book characters. They need to feel like you are their only hope, and that will not be hard with perverts like Pete over there. So, what do you want to be?”

He wants to say: _the boy Tessa Gray loves_.

“Anyone I can.”

*

_Tell me your secrets,_

_And ask me your questions,_

_Oh, let's go back to the start._

*

“Tess-uh,” Will says, nuzzling at her neck. It’s been a month that they’ve been together. Girlfriend and boyfriend. She thinks it didn’t feel like a change because they were already half in love with each other. Will goes lower, nibbling at the place where her neck meets her collarbones, and Tessa thinks, _or all in lust with each other_.

It’s been a heated thing—book quotes and a kiss on top of the bloody terrace, almost a thing from a dream, but she knows it’s true. She has evidence. _Hard_ evidence. She presses a hand to the front of his pants, and he keens loudly into her skin. Thank God there’s no one home.

Maybe she’ll go all the way today. Here it is, she thinks savagely, the one thing that makes her not miss Jem. Here it is, her medicine. She didn’t believe stories of people having magic dicks but maybe it’s true. She slides her hand up his body, onto his bare chest because shirts were off a long time ago. His skin is soft and hot and amazing, velvet to the touch. He’s still nibbling at her neck, taking his goddamned time and she gasps, “Get serious, you little shit.”

He moves up, grinning in that devious way of his which manages to make her excited and nervous at the same time. She pulls him down to kiss him, barely caring about if it’s too fast as she maps his mouth. He moves a hand on the top of her breasts, skimming along the tops of the bra, the skin that spills out of them, electric.

Her hand is on his back, feeling muscle, one in the v of his hipbones, teasing, situating herself between his legs, feeling him grow hard. Before she can do anything, though, he wrenches his mouth from hers, looking gloriously debauched; lips swollen red, cheeks flushed, blue eyes glinting, hair in disarray. He looks gorgeous.

“I have somewhere to go,” he says, panting.

“Come back here,” Tessa says, knowing this is textbook bad romance novel but not caring.

“Sorry, baby. Another time?”

He pushes around her to leave. His phone is ringing.

“Yeah, I know, was at home with the girlfriend,” he says while shrugging on his t-shirt and mouthing a ‘sorry’ at her as she sits on the bed, dumbfounded, “party at the McLarens? We gotta celebrate the youngest of our lot turning sixteen. You got my goods, right, Morty? Yeah, big or nothing, you know me.”

He slams the door of her bedroom behind him. She can’t see anything, and the tears that spill out of her eyes are hot, her vision blurry. _How dare he?_ Oh God, this feels shameful. This feels like nothing she’s ever felt. He threw her over for a party. What’s so special about a goddamn birthday party that he couldn’t be half an hour late to it? Also, ‘the girlfriend’? That’s what he calls her?

This does not feel like a thing from a dream anymore. Tessa throws her own t-shirt on and gets in the bed, curling up in her duvet, not trusting herself to actually go and talk to Will. She clenches her eyes shut and hears the front door close. She feels angry. She feels reckless. And now she’s going to go to that damn party dressed in the dress she bought that makes her look amazing and puts a lot of skin on display and dance right in front of her _boyfriend_ till he can’t take it anymore. She’s going to torture him, and he’s going to love it. Will always has wanted to be a masochist.

Maybe she’ll even drink a bit. He wants that Tessa, doesn’t he, the one that goes with him to these parties and football games and useless things. He wants a cheerleader doll—well, he’s going to get one.

“Hey,” she says, calling up a classmate.

“Tessa! What a pleasant surprise!”

“Sorry I can’t talk a lot, but Will and I have to go to a birthday party at the McLarens and he’s very drunk. And we really have to go today. The youngest one of the gang’s turning sixteen, you know.”

“Oh, I didn’t know you went to these parties—I’ll drop you an address, should make it easier for you guys.”

“Thank you, you’re a godsend.”

“That’s all right.”

Tessa cuts the phone and squeezes herself into a tiny black dress and tall black stilettos that hurt. Just the kind of thing Party Animal Will likes. She hates Party Animal Will. She likes the real one, the one that emerges when they’re alone, the one she remembers from their childhood. The one she might love. Damn these feelings, she thinks as she painstakingly applies eyeliner (stolen from Sophie’s room, of course). If she didn’t have them, she wouldn’t be doing this right now.

She steps out of the house, looks at the GPS. But she really doesn’t need to, because she can hear a heavy bass beat that is so out of place in the quiet neighbourhood that it has to be the party. She follows the music to the gates, where two boys are handing out red solo cups.

“I wouldn’t object to a hottie like you anytime, but after what happened last time…” One of the guys shuffles his feet as he talks.

“Yeah, who exactly are you?”

Has Will never pointed her out as his girlfriend? God, there are so many red flags and maybe she should just leave. But she holds her phone’s lock screen up, a photo of them both staring out at everyone. Will’s kissing her on the cheek.

“Hell, Will is like that with _every_ girl ever made.”

“I’m sure he hasn’t been for the past few weeks,” Tessa tells them, because she just wants in so that she can seduce her boy, is that too much to ask, “that’s because of me. So, would you please just…”

One of the thugs raises an eyebrow at her. “We like to let people believe what they wanna believe,” the guy drawls, cryptic and she doesn’t care, maybe it’s some sort of motto for how they’re drug addicts, “welcome to the digs, girl. Don’t come crying back to us when you get hurt, seems like you’ve never been to a party before.”

“Have fun,” says the other one. She just drinks whatever’s in the cup. It burns its merry way down her throat, but she doesn’t wince. How can people like this? She makes her way inside, where it really doesn’t look like a house at all. She can feel furniture that would be staid in the light but seeing how the only light is lasers like there are in bars in movies, and there are couples all over the furniture, she thinks she is right in feeling uncomfortable.

She asks someone where Will is and they smirk at her and comment on how she’s ‘another one’ and yes, she knows she’s another in a long line of girlfriends, but what she and Will have is special. They know each other—have done so since childhood. They laugh at her trying to explain it, and point to the back of the room.

Tessa’s heart lightens. Of course, he’s at the back of the room, probably sad and irritated and lonely that she isn’t here and drinking to cover it up. The prat. She walks through a dance floor and is very careful, as the back of the room is where all the couples are getting rather racy. Just like Will to sit and be sulky in the middle of all these hormones. He’s always been such a dramatic oxymoron, her boy.

“Unh,” a girl moans very, very loudly, “unh, Captain!”

“Drivin’ me crazy,” she hears a voice say. A voice she’ll know anywhere, “God, Morty always gets me the good ones.”

“Tess-uh,” Will says, nuzzling at the other girl’s neck. It’s been a month that they’ve been together. Girlfriend and boyfriend. She hears something break. Might be something at the party, might be her heart.

(And what does she think? _Jem would never do that to me._

That’s when Tessa first feels that there’s a problem.)

*

At the Bone School, one studies a lot. It’s safe to say that the name is completely misleading. No skeletons here, no sir. He’d looked at the grounds and wondered if this was a school for assassins when he was a first-year student. Now, secure in his penultimate year at the institution, he’ll miss it. But he’s missed Will and Tessa back home more, one more than the other, definitely. He feels like shit immediately after he thinks that, but it’s a done thought.

He misses Will too, yes, but he isn’t in love with the guy. It’s an important distinction to make, really. Sometimes he wishes he were in love with Will. It would be too easy: a painful confession and getting his heart broken because William is alarmingly heterosexual. Or at least Jem thinks so.

It’s sometimes sad, to feel like he doesn’t know anything concrete about Will Herondale, who he grew up with. Who he loves like part of his own self. It’s like Will has managed to slip between his fingers, like sand and a wire mesh. It feels bad. They were best friends. If the world made platonic pairs of people, they were supposed to be at the very top. But they aren’t, and he’s resigned to it, now.

James Carstairs: Compromiser.

Will would get the fact that Jem just doesn’t want to get hurt. It’s a perfectly reasonable thing to not-want. He’s always been perfectly reasonable. Maybe if he weren’t, were more confident, more _everything_ , would they miss him more?

He looks at the book again and feels his brain implode. He really can’t do this. He shoves his fingers through his hair, probably messing it all up in the way it shouldn’t be messed up. Crazy, he’s crazy, he should get himself checked into one of those old-timey sanatoriums, because only poison and shock therapy will cure him, will cure this. For hell’s sake, why did he have to go and fall in love? He was just fine without it. Just dandy.

With a roar of indignation, he rips the covers off his perfectly-made bed and shoves his face into a pillow to scream, books and decencies forgotten, manners and ‘complete silence’ on the merry way out the window.

How is he going to go on? How is he going to get a job? Nicholas Sparks lied to him, the little shit, love does not feel all light and feathery and nice, goddamn it all, it feels like he’s being ripped out, little by little and _incinerated_ in front of an invisible audience, so that he’s anxious about what they think even in his agony. This is simply bloody terrible, and if he were Rose or Jack, he wouldn’t have waited for the damned iceberg to hit the damned Titanic. God, he wishes he’d never ever met his feelings, never realized that he was in love with someone who might as well think of him as a brother.

“Shit,” he swears, loudly and carelessly, “Hell and damn and all the terrible stuff.”

He’s going to be kicked out of here for causing such a ruckus, for making such a terrible mess. He can imagine it, two random Brothers with unnecessarily intricate names dragging him out the ivory gates while he screeches about love. He hates being so seventeen-hormonal.

“Ugh,” he groans, disgusted with himself, with the non-existent chain of events that lead to this. He just woke up one day to the sudden realization of _oh, I’ve been falling in love with Tessa Gray my whole life_. The dorm door bangs open, and he jumps about a foot in the air.

“You sound like you’re having some really bad or phenomenally good sex in there. Looking at the state of your bed, I have to ask: where the fuck is the other person?”

“Chad, this is really not the time. Could you please—”

“This is my dorm too, Mary-Ann,” the git drawls. Jem wants to strangle him. “Wanted to ask you if we could play truth and dare.”

Jem almost huffs an impatient ‘get the hell out’ but then he thinks about it, and it isn’t a bad idea. Chad will definitely do something that’ll forbid him from thinking about Tessa, just for a little while, and that’s all he needs. Some respite.

“Fine,” he snaps.

Then: “Can we play it on your sex-mussed bed?”

Jem thinks about giving him the middle finger, but just says, “If that’s what gets you off, be my guest.”

Chad takes a bottle out of nowhere. Jem looks at the way he twirls it, his elegant fingers, his sunny blond hair that looks like if you turned the idea of California into a physical tangibility, and his long eyelashes fanning out against rose-tinted cheeks, and feels a shiver make its way down his spine for no reason at all.

Jem would be lying to himself if he said that he hadn’t looked at boys once or twice. Hadn’t thought of rough edges against his skin. Hadn’t imagined the kiss with one of the girls from Ferrous a little differently, with a boy instead of a girl. Jem would be lying to himself if he thought he was straight.

Jem would be lying to himself if he didn’t admit the fact that he wanted to lick Chad from chin to neck and back again and maybe a little nibble near the Adam’s Apple, just for a bit of fun, love be damned. Jem has accepted other, more serious truths about himself, so he stares at Chad a bit more, imagining flushed lips and flushed other places.

Would some dalliances make him forget his angel? Surely not. So what’s even the point? Everything he does is either to forget her or to remember her. He sits down onto his bed, stares into emerald-green eyes over the top of a bottle. He spins. Lands on Chad, as he hoped it would.

“Truth,” the other boy says.

“What’s one thing you’ve never told anyone?”

“I’m leaving tomorrow. Leaving the school. I’ll do you one better. I’ll tell you why.”

Chad’s voice is deep and dark and for a second, Jem loses himself in it but then he’s shocked again. He’s leaving? Really?

“I fell in love one October, and now I just can’t deal with seeing them anymore. Every day, across from me, unachievable, locked in their own world. It bloody hurts, being like this.”

Oh, he has no idea just how much Jem understands. _Try being in love with one girl since forever,_ Jem wants to say. Why is he leaving because of some Ferrous girl he’s moony for, probably fell for her at Halloween? Probably in love with her because she was playing hard-to-get, Jem thinks viciously.

“And I don’t think they know, and it’s killing me, so…I gotta go. It was so easy to fall in love with them, you have no idea.”

Something about the way Chad’s talking niggles at the back of his mind, like déjà vu. Like he should remember this from before. He spins the bottle.

“Dare,” he says to Jem, maybe because he’s a fool. Jem takes in a deep breath. If Chad’s leaving, then. Then what does Jem have to lose?

“I’m so sorry about the girl you love over at Ferrous. So sorry, Chad,” he starts, “but I have been having these thoughts and I need to know. Could you please kiss me.”

The last words are a bare whisper, but he hears. Jem sees him hear and hopes. Hopes that he’s not a homophobe, hopes that he can be a good bloody friend for the last time, because he’s leaving and Jem cannot handle this, not this, not after everything. He’s definitely not in love or anything, because that would be crazy and implausible and just not possible, but it just hurts thinking that his friend might just up and leave like that and god damn it, Jem wants something. Needs something real, to convince himself that all this romance business is one worth thinking about, because Tessa feels like a dream at the best of times.

Chad doesn’t say anything and he sighs. Looks at the way his bright green eyes are brimming with tears.

“Oh God, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to—you don’t have to do it if you don’t want to—”

Jem turns his head away, and the other boy crawls to him, even more in his space than he was already.

“Something to remember you by,” Chad whispers, and holds, just holds Jem’s jaw in his shivering hands, and then, kisses the corner of his mouth, not doing anything to turn Jem’s lips to his. Jem does it himself, slowly, feeling overwhelmed, feeling like he’s holding a butterfly, even though Chad’s holding him. The movement separates Chad’s lips from the corner of his, and Jem aches, wants them back. Jem just looks at Chad instead, at the lone tear rolling down his right cheek, and wipes it off with a shaking thumb, hurting at his hurt.

“I’m sorry,” he tells him, again, “Just think that I am her and that she is me.”

“Okay,” Chad says, hushed, “shouldn’t be hard.”

And then Chad kisses him, really kisses him, the hand that isn’t cradling his face tangling in his hair, and Jem’s fingers are still where the tear was, stroking that place over and over again, lips sliding against his, arching up off the bed like a madman to claim him, to be claimed, whatever, swiping his tongue in the hot wet heat of his lovely mouth and not caring if someone interrupts, this is lust, this is what they talk about, what he’s been missing.

“You’ve ruined me,” Chad gasps against his mouth, and Jem feels rage flare somewhere deep in him, tears his mouth away.

“You chose to kiss me,” Jem says, tumbling off the bed in his haste to get away so that they aren’t kissing, even though he misses it pretty much immediately, “I didn’t ruin you. Kissing a boy doesn’t ruin you.”

He gets up, and remembers when he first met Chad. He’d fallen off the bed then, too. What different reasons. “I hope you get over your girl,” he snarls, slamming the door behind him.

He makes his way to the washroom and slides to the floor, feeling like something’s been hollowed out of him, even though it was supposed to be casual. God, he misses Tessa. He wishes he could just talk to her, someone who didn’t think kissing him would ruin them.

*

Tessa is at the window. Sitting on the velvet seat Charlotte gifted her (“you sit there all the time, might as well make it comfortable”), thinking about everything and nothing in particular. This time of the year is always an emotional one. Jem will be back for his One Day of Freedom from the Bone School in about eight days. Usually, she’d be planning out what they would all do together, planning it to the minute, trying to fit in a year’s worth of feelings in the hour of discussion she allots. It never works out that way, so this year she just…doesn’t. Gives up.

She’s given up on a lot this year—but not Will. Not yet.

He’s her…love. Not romantic love, not now, maybe not ever again, but. She still loves him, loves him like the moon loves the sun. Loves him unconditionally. Soulmates, maybe. A twisted kind of soulmate, sure, but soulmates. They hurt each other, nearly killed each other, but they’re still a them. Tessa isn’t the type to harbour delusions—she knows this from the way Will seems to know what she’s thinking and feels what she’s feeling, the way he’s just as torn up (if not more) about Jem being gone.

Oh, Jem. Her lovely, lovely boy.

Hasn’t been near her for a long time and Tessa is maybe, maybe happy that he isn’t because then she’d have to see him every single day, and won’t that just be torture? Won’t it be hard, looking at his dear face, and just keeping on pretending? Because she cannot lie to herself anymore. Really, all the signs have been there, forever. She’s been so goddamn foolish, going on to Will and the string of short-lived boyfriends she’d had, when in reality, she’d been looking for him. Jem.

And that’s why her and Will are soulmates, because she, too spent the past few years looking for solace, for _Jem_ —in books, in boys, in work. He turned to partying. She realizes with a jolt that she really can’t fault him. It’s bad, and it’s unfair, but it’s not wrong. No coping mechanism is wrong. Some of them just hurt other people. That’s not right, yes, but it’s not unforgivable, either.

Will is not talking to anyone. He’s in one of his Moods, as Tessa has taken to calling them, locked up in the music room and staring at Jem’s cello for hours on end, forgoing food. She worries about him, leaves a plate in front of the mahogany shine of the door. The food goes cold every single time, without fail. She doesn’t know how long he’ll be able to go on like he is currently. All she knows is that she sits at that door for the most part of her day, doing her work sitting on the cold marble or a chair she drags to her spot. Her watch.

Sometimes she wonders: Can he kill himself?

A shudder runs through her at the very thought. He’s unpredictable. He acts, all the time, like Jem died—and every time he sees Jem, it’s like he sees him resurrected. It’s not healthy, his shift from mourning and grieving to eyes-wide-shut adoration. It unsettles her, because it’s a piece of tiny Will in this Will’s body, a Will of days gone by.

Him just going back to that innocent stage at the sight of James makes her wonder if their clocks stopped when Jem left, like Miss Havisham all alone in her empty house. Or if that expression of Will’s is just a lie, curated for the one he missed, a lie to say ‘I’ve been a saint without you, please return and we’ll have fun.’ She looks at her wristwatch. Time to check on Will. She takes paper and a pen along. This is getting terrible. She has to write to James.

She gathers her stuff and ties her hair in a knot at her neck and walks to the music room. It’s locked, predictably, but she stares at the heavy wooden doors like they might magically open for her. She slides down to the floor, back resting on the wood, and sighs loudly, so that he knows that she’s outside and so that he knows that he can ask her for help.

“Will?” She asks, like she always does. No answer.

Dear Jem, she begins. Looks at the words. Wow, they look empty. They don’t convey anything at all—how bad it all is here, how desperate she is for normalcy, how much she wants him back, how much she loves him. It shows absolutely nothing, the swirl at the end of the ‘r’ or the way her cursive ‘j’ looks on the paper, and thank God for it. He’d never come back if it did, if the way she wrote and the weight of the paper reflected her feelings. Or he’d come back too quick. Both of those possibilities are situations she won’t be able to handle.

“Will, please,” she says, looking at the page. “I’m writing to Jem.”

She hears something thud, and shallow breaths, and she knows Will’s settled down on the other side of the door. He will not open it, because he’s dumb and thinks he can get over everything alone, and she just wants to break the door down and shake him till he cries or screams or exhibits some flicker of emotion that is understandable.

“Okay, if you’re listening,” she sighs, “I’m worried, to say the least. James would be too, and I’m over Charlotte saying we shouldn’t disturb him, because he’d be pissed if I tried to keep all this for him. Anyone would be.”

Nothing.

“You have anything to say to him, Herondale?”

 _Nothing_. Fine, then. She’s never been able to beg well.

 _Hey_ , she writes, and contemplates cutting it out because it seems too damn casual for a letter written with the cold seeping in through her clothes and her brother/soulmate/whatever refusing to eat or speak or talk a few inches away from her.

But she’s promised to herself that the first letter she writes will be the letter she sends because if she starts making drafts, she’s going to send nothing; so she leaves the ‘hey’ alone, continues.

_I have things to say that I probably shouldn’t, not right now when your fourth year is almost over. Important year, right? That’s what all the ex-student forums say._

_Yeah, my small talk has always been bad, but it’s especially trainwreck-like this time, because one, I can’t lie without it being practiced and two, this is serious. I can see your forehead scrunching up, even though I’ve never really known you well enough to know your minute expressions while getting bad news._

_It's just a feeling of mine. Probably stupid._

_Will is not in a good place right now. Hasn’t been for a while. A very long while, and he just transforms back into Jolly Old Will when he sees you, and when you leave. It worries everyone because the rest of his year is him trying to numb himself to his surroundings the best ways he knows how, a habit that is indulged by his friend circle. I hate it, but I couldn’t stop him when I should’ve, because I was also pretty drawn into myself when it all happened. It has been terrible, being alone with so many people around me. But this is not about me._

_Jem, he needs help. He needs good friends and something to ground him and I really do not know how to do anything because he never says anything to me. You will know what to do, because I’m useless, and I can’t see him live like this. It’s like watching something decompose._

_James, he needs you back. I need you back here, so that we can be us again. A family, won’t that be nice? Will and I just cannot seem to move past this, though believe me, we tried. But that ended badly, too. You don’t need to know just how devastating that was._

_Darling, I…I don’t know what to feel about this. You were always my keystone, and I’ve managed all this time without you, but now I fear we need you back. The Bone School allows for ‘extenuating circumstances.’ I have a feeling this qualifies, and even a week with you will do him a lot of good. Please._

She signs it _‘Love, Tessa,’_ and puts it aside, after writing down her phone number as an afterthought. It’s a short letter because her hands are shaking with the effort of not writing a gigantic ‘PLEASE’ all over the thing, ripping the paper with the force of it. It’s a short one because she wants to write that she loves him and that she thinks he’s the only one who can save them and her and everything, that he’s her own pocket miracle. It’s a short one because she has to try to talk to Will again.

“Honey,” she says, pleading, “I’m putting the thing in an envelope. I’ll put in a P.S. from you if you want.”

Nothing.

*


	2. seventeen - twenty-seven

_Running in circles,_

_Coming up tails,_

_Heads on a science apart._

*

 _Even a week with you will do him a lot of good_ , Tessa’s written.

Jem’s worried. He reads and re-reads the letter, trying to find some sort of clue as to how bad it is, if he can help with a letter, but his eyes seem to have stitched themselves to _Will is not in a good place right now. Hasn’t been for a while_ , and he shivered when he read that because there were too many scenarios swimming in his brain. And they were all things he couldn’t stomach. He has had nightmares ever since he got that letter, waking up to a quiet dorm with images of bloody wrists and blue eyes in his head.

He’s not doing too hot, and people are noticing. His teachers are worried. His friends are downright panicky. His face looks like the emaciated corpse-mask they have to wear one day out of the week as Silent Brothers. The letter is all he’s been reading with some respectable modicum of attention, its paper creased with him stuffing it in and out of various robe pockets, running his fingers over it in class as if it were a lucky charm.

He has to accept it: something went wrong. He doesn’t know why, or how, but she’s written _he needs you back_. Will needs him back. Tessa says he’ll be better if he returns, which means…it’s his fault. All of that—whatever’s wrong with Will, for whatever reason: it’s all his fault. He caused it.

Ever since the letter arrived and he read through it a good ten times, he’s been thinking of what he did. Did he say something, some fly-away remark that hurt Will too much. He did not, he knows, he is always so careful with Will, because it’s the first time he sees Will in a long time every time he sees Will. They only meet once a year, he doesn’t have the capacity to be hurtful those days, god damn it.

 _Love, Tessa_ , says his head. She needs you. Will needs you. You have to go back, they’re your family. Nothing’s more important than family. Jem sighs, looking at the marble floor of the ballroom. He has to complete his schooling, for God’s sake.

But Will…

This was what his parents wanted. The thought runs through his brain with a shock that doesn’t quite register after everything, but he closes his eyes and breathes in. This was what the Carstairs wanted for their only son, and he’ll be damned if he doesn’t at least attempt to honour the only scrap of some last wish he has from them. His parents died, and this is all he has from them.

All he can guess about them he can guess from this place, this school. His father’s name shines on the plaques in the Hall of the Incandescent, one of the many best students in the history of the Bone School. Whenever he talks to any of the Ferrous girls, he asks them about his mother, another legend. He thinks they think he’s weird and possibly obsessed, but he isn’t at these parties to find his soulmate.

He's at the end-of-year ball at the very moment, and the ballroom smells more like cologne than perfume. He sips at the watered-down wine in his flask—Eddie’s father is quite insistent on making Eddie into a ‘Man,’ and apparently that involves Eddie (and by extension, everyone in their little dorm) knowing the taste of different alcohols.

Eddie’s father wants to give them a thorough education before they ‘go out into the world.’ The wine is the last of the alcohol, and every boy has a bottle, because Eddie has a crazy, stupidly rich father. Jem waters his down because it’s red, he wants it to last and he doesn’t want to get addicted. He will not, he knows.

Not with Pete passing out after vomiting from vodka one night and Tessa’s letter in his suit pocket. Mostly Tessa’s letter.

He remembers the way he’d stepped in the room after his school day was over and found the boys staring at the bottles, Pete with a particularly hungry look in his eye. And then he’d decided: screw it. For some time. Because he’d been feeling lonely and crappy for a long time, and well.

He’d been missing Tessa and Will and home, and he wanted something to stop it, because _hell,_ it hurt. They’d decided to break open the goods after dinner. They drank well (Jem thinks, though he’s probably wrong) for their first time, and he remembers through a fog the sharp stench of vomit and the way it had half-sobered him and made the other half of him inclined to drink more.

He can see the white of the porcelain bathtub they’d left Pete retching and puking into, too damn foolish to stuff his head into the easily cleaned commode. He remembers that they left him in there, and drank more, and after Jem woke up with the worst headache of his rather short life, groaning into his pillow for half an hour, he went to wash his face and was greeted with the lovely sight of his friend, Brother Patrick, half in the bathtub, face pressed to the puke-covered bottom.

Thankfully, he had not choked on his own puke. He remembers that they’d all called in sick, saying that one of them left the windows open and using the corpse-masks and the contacts they wear (“to experience blindness and develop empathy for the less privileged,” a teacher had said on Jem’s first day) to cover up any obvious facial signs. They got away with it, and after that, the drinking was always kept in control.

No one can see him in this alcove, but he still pockets his flask swiftly after two measured sips. Caution is good. No need to get punished unnecessarily. No need to get punished over watered-down wine.

This drinking is maybe not what his parents would’ve wanted, but they did it, in a way. It was their wish that he be so very far away from Tessa and Will, and look what that’s done. Jem smiles bitterly. He’s sure his parents were very nice people, but they had no right to plan his whole life out before he even started breathing. They had no right. If they were alive, he would’ve not protested against it, because he would not have known Will and Tessa, but they are not. They’re gone, and all he has of them is foggy memories, headstones and money that he doesn’t care about.

He knows one should not disrespect the dead, but their wishes to put their son in a posh school should’ve died with them. How many years with Will has he missed? How many inside jokes and conversations lost? Does Henry know that he’s not there in the house, hasn’t been for years? How much has Charlotte forgotten about him? Does Sophie even know who he is anymore? How much does Tessa have to strain at her memory to recall his face?

He respects his parents, yes, but sometimes, in his more intense moods, he wishes they hadn’t catalogued out his life for him. And then he knows that they’re dead, and he feels guilty, and then he feels angry, because it seems like parents win every argument for some reason or the other, even when they’re not _there_. Maybe this is how childhood feels like—but Jem thought he would be grown-up by now, when he was younger.

_It has been terrible, being alone with so many people around me._

He looks at the swarming ballroom and presses himself further into the cold wall behind him. I know the feeling, Tessa. I know it intimately. It is terrible, and I wish you never experienced it. You do not deserve the hurt that comes with it, my heart.

I am sorry.

*

“Jem,” she pleads, plaintive, “don’t leave. You’ve been there for four years; don’t you miss me?”

“Tess, I do, of course I do, how can you say something like that?”

Tessa sees him once every year. He looks like her dreams and but his refusal to stay is out of her nightmares. _I love you_ ; she wants to say, _can’t you see it? Isn’t it written on my face?_

“What do they do to you over there?” She demands, tearful, desperate. “What do they do to make you want to _leave_?”

“Take all the money for schooling, it’s expensive, you know,” he says.

His eyes are dancing _,_ and Tessa can’t make him see how she feels, why it’s serious. Will is _dying_. He hasn’t been out to see Jem and no one seems to have noticed just how big of a disaster signal that is.

“This is not a joke,” she snarls, “one of those riots you share with your little intelligent friends, James Carstairs, this is a bloody horror show and you will not talk to me like a child!”

“Tessa?” Now it hits. Now his tone is wary and careful, and he’s stopped goddamn smiling. Finally, she has his attention.

“There is a reason William Herondale is not here. A reason you haven’t seen him this year, a reason why I wrote you that panicked letter before you could come home.”

He cuts her off. “Yes, I read it, I had it by the end-of-year ball a couple of days ago—”

Tessa digs her nails into her denim-covered thigh, a thing she’s developed recently. It’s a pretty obvious tell of the fact that she’s feeling emotionally not-okay and that Jem needs to shut up and listen, but he isn’t getting it, so she continues.

“There is a reason I’m begging you that is different from me missing you, even though it hurts like you would not believe, old friend.”

“No,” Jem whispers, face almost collapsing, but then it turns itself into a collected, calm mask that Tessa is too envious of. How dare he. How dare he be so adjusted in the face of everything falling apart. “How serious is everything?”

“Oh, your parents saved you, Jem. Save you from a lifetime of pulling Will Herondale out of parties and out of girls’ beds! Out of tequila shots and beer mugs! If I shattered when you left, he turned to powder.”

She laughs an ugly laugh and continues, voice icy, “Who knows, maybe literally that too, by now.”

And Tessa knows she shouldn’t, but she feels smug and slightly victorious at the quick replacement of that calm, collected mask with its opposite. The boy runs a hand through his black hair and his eyes are brimming silver in the light. His mouth quivers.

“Tessa, how could this happen?” She hates herself for being so wrapped up in her own world that she didn’t notice Will falling apart. She sees Jem shiver even though the room is warm.

“How didn’t you take care of him?”

She hates him for his queries, hates him totally and completely, because she’s loathed herself for not having the answers. Jem sounds broken, and all she wants to do is comfort him but she cannot. He has to be hurt if she wants him to stay.

“Oh, he’s not my child.”

“That is an ugly thing to say.”

“You don’t call, you don’t write,” she counters, pitching her voice low and dangerous, “you might as well not be alive. That is an ugly thing to do. You knew it. You knew we loved you.”

Will’s been in there for too many days and this is not right. This is not right, Tessa has been screaming in front of his door, but she can’t hear a single thing. No sign of life.

“School. Will got very popular, very fast. He was football captain, rumoured Head Boy, popular favourite in no time. He needed someone to share it with, and you weren’t there. So, he went around looking to substitute you. Maybe one of those people could be another James Carstairs. But you know he couldn’t find one. He fell out of relationships like a maniac. And then he just got addicted to that lifestyle. The lifestyle of finding you.”

Tessa buries her head in her hands, looking through her fingers at the floor.

“And then he saw me. Not lying to you. I never could—I thought I was in love. I thought he was going to stop. I thought it was all solved. That every time I kissed him; he came back to who he used to be. The Will I was really loved, had loved forever. I think we only got as far as we did because we had losing you in common.”

Jem puts his arms around her, and she can feel him shaking. Poor boy. Poor her. Poor them. She does love him, but he needs to see beyond everything else to the fact that Will does too, and it’s killing him. She hopes she’s putting it clearly enough, because she cannot say ‘Will loves you,’ without invading both of their individual privacies on a matter to delicate to be invaded.

Tessa has known for maybe her entire lifetime that Will is in love with Jem, like she is, but more…unhealthily. She knows she shouldn’t judge what someone else feels, but it’s _Will_. Her Will. She knows what’s bad for him, because she knows him, and she can see him being torn apart in Jem’s presence and devoid of it, like nothing will make him happy again.

It hurts that they couldn’t make each other better—it makes her feel like maybe there’s something wrong in her, something broken. They should’ve been able to laugh it off, become closer together because of it. But Will is in the music room staring at Jem’s instruments and she is here staring at Jem and she is pretty sure they both feel completely, utterly helpless. Jem has that effect on them.

She wishes she weren’t in love with Jem. Then all this would be easier. All she would have to do would be to set them up and see if they fall in love, a supporting character in their perfect rom-com. It would be so nice…so easy. Tessa wishes it were easy again.

She composes herself, because she was telling him something. Ah, yes, the story of the relationship.

“In the end, I caught him at a party mouthing at a girl’s neck. It was devastating but we’re okay, really. The only reason it didn’t work out was because both of us were trying to change each other. He wanted Party Wild Girl Tessa, and I wanted Innocent Past Will. We both actually needed you, and I think you need to think about that. It wasn’t a relationship. It was an experiment. I guess that’s where we went wrong.”

“I’m so sorry, Tess,” he says, “but I cannot leave the school four years out of five.”

He isn’t thinking. She pushes him away, sick, close to losing it, close to losing everything. But before she can say anything—

“The Bone School does this rehab thing. You can help a student or a family member. It’s supposed to do something to your values. He’ll be gone for a month. He’ll be with me all the time. I promise you; I’ll make him right.”

She moves further away from him, wraps her arms around herself, wanting it all to be true, because watching Will become the opposite of himself…it’s been hell.

“Do whatever. I need him back. I need you back. I need both of you fine by my side, and if one month of rehab does that for him and five years of Bone School does that for you then whatever. I need my boys by my side, Jem.”

“How did he manage to do this to himself?”

“One thing, James. Don’t let him experiment. It’ll hurt.”

“I’ll let him do whatever he needs to do to get back to himself. And to you. You love each other. All that, back then, you guys not working out? Just a misunderstanding. Maybe I’ll be the flower-boy at your wedding.”

He doesn’t understand. Will loves _him_. She loves _him_. It’s all such a mess. Tessa would give anything at all to be young again.

*

“This place is beautiful,” says Will, and there are dark circles around his eyes, almost swallowing up his gaunt face. Jem just looks up at the periwinkle violet line of the horizon and struggles to appear calm, focuses on not shaking Will by the shoulders, with all the force he has in him, because the boy looks, for the first time in forever, weaker than Jem. He’s pale and he breathes shallowly and he walks slowly on the marble floor that Jem now knows as if it were his own.

In the midst of this familiar atmosphere, this drastically-changed Will makes his head spin, makes him want to throw things, but he breathes in, doesn’t show it, sets Will’s suitcase down at the foot of the bed allotted to him, the only one in the room they’ll be sharing. In the school’s defence, students aren’t supposed to stay with their charges. But he was adamant that Will not be left alone, and there has been something in his expression, maybe, that let it be allowed. He doesn’t really care. All he’s thinking about is the way Will’s hand shakes very slightly sometimes, because he’s not had enough food. They gave him a meal but he couldn’t keep anything more than a few slices of bread down.

He had the audacity to ask for alcohol.

Jem had punched him then, and he can see the mark of it now as Will turns, bottom lip split open, blood drying. It’s not a bruise yet, and he knows it will be but hopes it won’t. He’s always hoped for impossibilities. He wants to worry at the hurt, to press fingers against it, try to smooth it away, but he knows he’ll be clumsy and inefficient and that his fingers have never been tipped with any special kind of magic, let alone healing. He isn’t that good.

God, the last time he saw Will hurt had been a long time ago, and this makes him feel bad, that it was him who did it. But he doesn’t really regret it. The way Tessa had looked, the words on that letter, the way Will had looked when he’d pushed open the door to the music room, sitting in the middle of the wood-panelled floor all alone. No, he does not regret it. It had been almost cathartic, really, and he might almost say that it had been for a Will from long ago, who would’ve approved, definitely. (Maybe this is his excuse, maybe it’s an actual reason, but the deed is done and there is no point thinking on it, but still, _he is thinking on it._ )

“I kind of want to do the meditation thing one of your professors was talking to me about,” he continues. “I guess it would be peaceful and quiet. I—I need that, I think.”

 _You do_ , he thinks to himself, looking at Will, _and I hate that you do, that you’re not okay_.

“If you think it would help you, William,” he says instead.

“William, Jem?” asks Will. He doesn’t look into Jem’s eyes. “You never used to call me that so formally. It just used to be my name, and now it’s an admonition.”

He wants to keep quiet. He knows he shouldn’t answer, but, “Big word, my friend. Some would go so far as to say that the party lifestyle didn’t completely scramble your thinking.”

He can hear her voice in his head, Tessa’s, saying something like _be kinder_ , but he’s not happy. Not happy with himself for disregarding Tessa’s warnings, not happy with life for doing this to Will, not happy with Will for trying to be all stoic and ending up being stupid, not happy with himself because this is because of him, he who didn’t reach out.

“Bitchy, aren’t you. You should try living like me for years at a time, all fucking alone and not okay, with no one who understood,” snarls Will.

“You were never alone,” says Jem, and shuts up. But then he cannot. He’s got to defend the people who love Will. “Never alone. There were so many people who were willing to talk to you, to get you help, to do whatever you wished, even. Charlotte was _desperate_ when she agreed to this suggestion, and you didn’t see her then, did you? That would’ve been a blow, I should have clicked a picture for you and then maybe you would think about how f—screwed up everyone else was, too. What did you do?”

He inhales, looks away first because he doesn’t want to punch him again, because he doesn’t want to go hug him, say _I’m sorry could you forget that I meant it but I didn’t mean it I’m sorry_. It would be not-good, and he really doesn’t want to make this any worse than it already is. That’s not required.

“Just,” he says, sighs. “Just get some rest, Will. Take a nap. I’ve got to get some free passes for general use around the school, so that you aren’t disturbed. Do you want me to get anything?”

Will turns away from him, looks out of the window. “Turn the temperature up, I feel cold in here.”

He gives up. “Please. Talk to me. Tell me something that isn’t empty or something that I can’t understand, because I need to help you. I need you. We need you, for heaven’s sake, _Will_.”

“You left,” says Will, looking at the bed with its perfectly white sheets like they could solve something, “You left, Jem. You went _away_.”

“There was no choice, oh God oh God,” says Jem, and moves towards him when he sees frail shoulders shake, but he isn’t fast enough.

“You left me alone!” Will shrieks, sobs, crumples to the floor, “And you didn’t know, you didn’t even know it when you went away, you don’t even know it now, did you even _talk to Tessa_? Did you even think about what you did to us?”

“This is about you, tell me about you,” he says, because he doesn’t want to think, and he’s trying to pull Will up to sit up on the linens, but Will just sits there, like he’s been melded to the floor when Jem wasn’t looking and that’s absurd, fucking impossible, because Jem was _always looking_.

“I’m _trying_!” screeches Will, the sound and the pain in it deafening Jem, killing him, almost, and isn’t everyone? “The problem is, dear darling handsome, that you left, okay, and I think that I loved you a bit too much and that I couldn’t take it. The problem is, lovely adorable beautiful, that I think the booze fucked up my brain. The problem is, sweetheart, that I think I have had my brain for far too bloody long, and that one night during all those long days I decided I couldn’t take it anymore and just snapped.” He stopped, breathing heavily, eyes wild and dark. “What’s your diagnosis, James Carstairs?”

“You should rest,” he says weakly, and Will throws his feeble, quaking hands up in the air, smiles suddenly, wide and bright and charming, a total one-eighty from his mood a second ago.

“So I should, old boy.” He gets up, gets in the bed, and Jem moves to set the blankets so that they cover him, essentially tucking him in.

“Don’t sleep on the floor,” Will says, “not for my sake, James.” His face is very close, breaths warm, and Jem can feel them, and he’s so very relieved that this is not him bending over a corpse, so very thankful to everything that Will’s still alive, not in some wood box that couldn’t contain him anyway, in a black suit, perfectly tailored but grotesque, for all that. Which is why he stays there, praying.

Will moves up, and kisses him. It’s a soft, drowning thing, the sort of kiss Jem’s never felt, the sort of kiss that comes from actual love, romantic love, a pained thing, Will’s lips soft against his. He’s not surprised, and he doesn’t know why, but he kisses back anyway, for a few seconds. After it’s over, him breaking away, he doesn’t open his eyes from when he’d closed them as Will kissed him.

“You don’t have to charm me, William,” he murmurs, eyes still closed, lips still almost touching Will’s.

“You didn’t tell me you’re in love with someone else, James.” His voice is accusatory, like he didn’t just confess something huge over the space of a few seconds. He doesn’t sound heartbroken. He just sounds curious, like Jem not loving him was something he knew would happen and had grown accustomed to.

And that had to be a hard pill to swallow, and keep in for years.

“Will you be okay?” he asks, and trusts the boy who he loves, and who loves him back, not to lie.

“It’ll take me time, but as long you’re there, I will be.”

“Will, it’s not your fault,” he says, because it’s not his fault that Jem was weak for Tessa’s eyes pretty much the moment he saw them, that he didn’t take into account what other people could possibly feel, that he was selfish and foolish and young and in love for all that. “I’m in love with her.”

“Oh, I know,” smiles Will. Jem can see the hurt in his throat, in the way he tilts his head, but he believes in what Will said before. “I was, too.”

*

_Nobody said it was easy,_

_It's such a shame for us to part._

_Nobody said it was easy,_

_No one ever said it would be this hard._

_Oh, take me back to the start._

*

It’s been almost a year since Will came back from the Bone School, better, miraculous. It’s nearing the end of Jem’s schooling. She was drawing up plans for a bookstore-and-café chain and thinking of asking Charlotte and Henry what they think about her proposition. Begin small, and slowly expand. She wants to name it The Spiral Labyrinth. Now, she’s lying on her bed, ink stains on her fingers because she’s tired and fountain pens never will go out of fashion.

“Knock, knock.”

“Hey, Will,” she says, “Come in, come in.”

He’s grown up since he went to the Bone School. Cleaned up the act, broken a whole lot of ties that everyone but him didn’t like, given up on toxic relationships. Started studying more. He was the one who gave the idea for the Labyrinth to be a bookstore-and-café.

“Keep the two areas—bookstore and café—separate. And if somebody damages a book, you know, while eating, they buy it,” he’d said, “People like to eat and they like to read.”

She’d been sold on the idea immediately.

He tucks his head in the crook of her elbow when he comes to lie down next to her on her bed. They’re silent for a long while, matching their breathing with each other. She finds it reassuring, and then he sighs.

“I’m sorry,” he mumbles, “That we had a shit relationship.”

She shakes her head. “Jem thinks that we’ll get back together, that we’re both in tragic, star-crossed love.” It doesn’t hurt to refer to it like that anymore. It probably never did, really.

She watches as Will raises his head to get comfortable and she runs a hand through his hair. It feels weak, somehow. “Jem’s a fool,” Will says, dismissive and aching, “He can’t see that we’re both hopelessly in love with him. Yes, Tessa. I know your secret. You’ve known mine for years, haven’t you? It’s only fair, lovely.”

The room’s very, very quiet.

“You can love him, I feel,” he continues. “I think you have a chance to be loved back.”

“Hey,” she whispers.

“No, really,” he says, and he sounds both determined and defeated. God, she wishes she could stop loving the way she does.

“Will—”

“There’s no point. I know it now. The Bone School demands absolute silence at all times, so I had the chance to think a lot. Beautiful place, by the way. I could wake up as the beginning of the day was beginning, and I could go out and sit on these amazingly green lawns and think about everything. I love him, and it kills me, and that shouldn’t happen.”

She winds a dark curl of his around her finger.

“I’m not that bad of a person. I deserve to love without it hurting, Tessa, and I guess that was my great revelation. Also that you guys would be like, super cute together. Super polite dark-haired babies. You can read them stories of my bravery and gloriousness, because I will be adventuring across the sky. I’ll bring you back a star or two.”

“Just me?”

“We have a certain bond, I think.”

She smiles. “We would’ve made an awesome couple.”

“Oh, definitely.”

“Evil-defeating babies.”

“Superhero babies.”

“Sometimes I wish we loved each other.”

He smiles back at her sadly. “But then I see his smile, and I know that he’s different. That I’m different. I do love you though, even more than I love him.”

“I know. Same here,” she says.

His blue eyes sparkle up at her. “So, what do you think?”

“About what, dumbass?”

He laughs. “What I learned at the Bone School? My eureka? My discovery of penicillin?”

“I think your lesson of ‘I don’t need no man’ is very inspiring, sweetheart. Jokes aside, I’m sad you learnt it so late, and after so much sadness. You do deserve love, William,” she tells him, looking at him looking at her, “Most people do, and you are one of them, because you’re sweet, and kind, and amazing—all the good things. You’ve got to know that, honey. And if you want to give up on Jem, it’s your decision. I’m an unreliable viewpoint on this, seeing as I am incapable of giving up on Jem, but I’ll support you on whatever you want to do. Whatever you want to do that’s good for you. I’m there for you.”

“I know,” he says, “I don’t think of it as giving up on him. I feel like I’m letting go of him, and I know it’s all different words for the same thing, but that is what I truly feel that I’m doing.”

A pause.

“Oh, fuck,” he groans, “I sound like a terrible teen romance novel. Should we have sex just to further the cliché, suddenly realize we love each other, not James?”

Tessa strokes his cheek. “Ravish me, you wild stallion,” she says breathily.

“Ugh,” Will says, “I am not a stallion, woman. Absolutely not.”

“Others your age would kill to hear that whispered to them in bed,” she states flatly. “But I guess you’re quite an exception.”

“I am _the_ exception, resisting your charms like I do.”

He really is. “You’re amazing, you know that?”

He smiles up at her. “You think so?”

“Of course. You’re _Will Herondale_ , honey. You’re amazing for so many reasons, I cannot even list them all out, and I’m good at lists.”

“Oh God, T.”

“Mm hm. Least of all is your ability to let go of someone you’ve loved for—I don’t even know. I feel like such an asshole sometimes.”

“You really shouldn’t.”

She sighs. “Whatever, Will.”

*

_I was just guessing,_

_At numbers and figures,_

_Pulling the puzzles apart._

*

Will’s playing the piano, and Jem’s watching him play, the sun skittering over his skin, washing it in gold. Jem doesn’t want to play his violin, not yet, because the piano sounds better and the piano sounds worse, and Will fucks up sometimes, on purpose, the wrong chord sounding harsh and discordant in the room, but he keeps playing.

“I like piano too much,” he’d said once, to Tessa, sprawled across the long length of her legs, all diva, all Will, as Jem watched, like he always did. “I like the way the keys feel, I like the little sounds they make, and I don’t think I’m ever going to love a person.” Some might say that _the way I loved you_ was unheard. Jem feels that it was Will saying that he couldn’t love _a_ person, not just _a_ person, not anymore, and then he sees the way Will looks at both of them, sometimes, when he thinks that Jem can’t see him, and he feels that he is right. About Will not loving _a_ person anymore.

But who can love two people at the same time? It’s unheard of. Jem doesn’t think about it (much) and ignores the notepad under his unsteady hands to look at Will playing, and he’s been playing the same piece for over an hour now, so all the mistakes he’s making are all on purpose, but he lets Will make them anyway.

Because isn’t that what a best friend is for?

Will grins at the keys as he changes the music to the Harry Potter theme, and Jem tears a page to ball up and throw at him. His aim is off and the paper bounces harmlessly off the instrument, falls on the ground. Will grins wider, doesn’t stop playing.

“You utter plebeian,” Jem remarks when he finishes with an extravagant, unneeded, flourish. His imaginary audience claps, and Jem, undone by Will’s brilliant smile, does too. “You know I like the themes to drama films better, not the half-baked songs used in series for mass consumption.”

“You snob,” says Will, somewhat fondly. “I am not playing you songs from Titanic again. And don’t you dare pretend that you don’t play the LOTR soundtrack often. You dance to the slow, sad songs, Carstairs. All alone. Like a weirdo.”

“The movie adaptations of the Lord of The Rings were a work of art,” says Jem, because what can you say to that? “Hardly series for mass consumption.”

“You _snob_. Of course it’s a series for mass consumption. They have Orlando Bloom.”

Jem gives in to the inevitable. “How could you forget Viggo Mortensen?”

“Viggo Mortensen is my heart’s own, darling, and my feelings for him are not to be revealed to you mortals.”

“Ah, I miss movie night.”

“Movie night’s tomorrow. I swear, you and Tessa are the same people sometimes.” Will stretches, his joints popping. Jem cringes and feels the unnaturally smooth surface of his blue-painted nail. Will catches him cringing, and his grin stretches wider. “The same people, both of you. Haven’t changed much since forever. Do you know what’s for lunch today?”

“No, we’ve been in here since morning, both of us. Haven’t moved.”

“Oh, okay,” says Will. “That’s a long time for you to be sitting there, doing nothing. How unproductive of you, dear. Has Jem Carstairs been replaced with someone else?”

 _Yes,_ he thinks, _I am scared for you all the time and I cannot let you out of my sight because how will I tell Tessa, how will I live if something happens to any one of you? Yes, I am different, yes, I have changed._ “Oh, shut up,” he says instead. “I can relax too.”

“And did you hear me doubt that, ever? It was just a joking question.” He’s playing it up now, dramatic sweeps of his hands and draping himself over the piano. A sharp note rings in the room, hangs between them till Jem laughs, alleviating the tension in the room that seemed to come out of nowhere.

“I miss us, like we were, uh,” he confesses, suddenly, in the space between the moments after which one of them would inevitably say something insignificant, “long ago. I really do.”

Will’s quiet.

“Do you remember?”

It’s almost a whisper when he does speak, but it sounds loud in the room. “How could you think I ever forgot? I mean it when I say you’re the same as you used to be, and that doesn’t let me choose the option for selective amnesia. I remember. God, sometimes I wish I didn’t.”

It hurts, hearing him say those words. It _aches_. “Don’t say that. Don’t say it like it was something terrible.”

“It wasn’t terrible at all.” Will laughs darkly. “That’s why I don’t want to know that it ever happened. But I can’t let go of the memories. They’re too precious to me. Not just precious, I need them to live. I need the reassurance that it wasn’t all bad to carry on. To keep on the non-dangerous path.”

He’s been sober for more than ten years now, but he’s _Will_ , and Jem has never stopped being worried, all through growing up and leaving and getting a job and building a life out of everything.

“I know,” Jem says. “I wish it wasn’t like this.”

It’s an apology for a lot of things—I’m sorry I didn’t come back at the right time, I’m sorry you loved me and I couldn’t love you back, I’m sorry you and her couldn’t make it, I’m sorry I keep on hurting you like this with my words, I’m sorry I have done this to all of you, I’m sorry I couldn’t help you.

_I’m sorry I left in the first place._

He doesn’t go a day without feeling the repercussions of that particular happening. He doesn’t go a moment without feeling like he killed something.

Will gets off the bench. “I’m sorry too,” he says, looking down at the polished floor. “I miss us like we were long ago, too. Oh, well. Nothing to be done about it now, is there? I think piano’s over for the evening, I don’t feel so good.” He gets up, and gives Jem a weird kind of smile. Before Jem can ask him what the problem is, he falls to the floor with a thud.

And that’s when it starts, and ends.

*

The biopsy reports come in on a Thursday. Thursday. Thursday.

A Thursday.

“Positive,” the doctor says, and Tessa walks out of the office, shaking. Will runs out after her. She doesn’t know she’s crying until she collapses on the floor in the hospital corridor.

She remembers just how damn cold the floor had felt, later.

“Please,” Will says, and she can’t hear it all properly, everything roaring, white noise, “please. Let’s go home, sweetheart. Let’s go home.” He’s crying too, but she doesn’t know if it’s for himself or for her. Probably her.

He pulls her up, seats her on one of those waiting chairs. The leather squeaks when she drops down upon it. He falls to his knees in front of her, but it’s all very blurry because she can’t seem to stop crying. He holds her trembling hands in his. “Tessa.” His voice is watery. She sobs louder.

After what seems like a lifetime, her hands still in Will’s, clasped so tight it is painful, Jem’s voice comes through, strained like something’s choking him. But she knows, somehow, that he’s not crying.

“Home,” he says, the syllable terse. She can’t read his voice. She wonders how he’s not screaming. She wonders if he knows by now that Will loved him, because if the worst happens, he might never know. All the feelings are so complicated, but she doesn’t just want their source to go away. She wants Will to _stay_.

She had been so close to losing him, just a few years ago. It’s not fair.

She cannot imagine it, a life without him. A life without him dropping in one of the Spiral Labyrinths with his smiling face and his hands full of tiny gifts for her employees. A life without their unofficial but regular weekly fancy lunches after which they went back to Tessa’s place and got shit drunk. A life without Will playing the camp to Jem’s straight, without that rare smirk that Will smirked whenever Jem got all dressed up in his fancy suits for a meeting with some rich client and Will knew just how badly Tessa wanted Jem. A life without his crazy schemes, spread out on the wall of Jem’s third guest bedroom, glittering with hope and the multitude of pins that helped keep the thing up.

She does not want to imagine it. Will seats her in the car, carefully, and she does not know how they got here. “Oh God,” she gasps out in between sobs, “oh God, Will.”

He wraps his arms around her in the backseat, whispering reassurances in her ear that she knows are lies and hence doesn’t hear, dropping kisses on her forehead that ache because these may be the last few he ever gives her. Jem moves in sharp strides to the driver’s seat, and she aches for all of them. Why are they so doomed?

She sees Will look helplessly at Jem as the car starts with an almighty jerk, which is not usual, because Jem drives the best out of all of them and the car is new, only seven months old, bought with Will’s savings at his fancy national security job. She can see the tension blanketing Jem, wants to tell Will to leave her and try to comfort him, but the car is moving now, as smoothly as it ever was and Jem looks like he wants to drive himself into a tree with the airbags turned off.

But his hands are steady, and he doesn’t break a single rule, even when everyone else is cutting into lanes like it’s their birthright. His lips are pursed tight, so tight. The set of his jaw looks painful. Tessa turns away into Will’s shoulder, which is already wet with her tears. Will curls around her, as if trying to protect her from something. His hands smooth her hair uselessly. There is nothing to be done.

She falls into memory like a drug addict.

She remembers a conversation she and Will had, ages ago, when she was setting up the first Spiral Labyrinth. They were stacking books onto shelves, and it was late at night. The other workers had left.

“Are you into someone right now?” she had asked, because well, they were supposed to be close and she didn’t know a lot of things about him, and she had been bored.

“I have wanted to have sex with approximately every lady who walks into my cabin, because they all wear suits and do you know how hot women are in suits? Let me answer for you: very hot. Hot like burning. That’s just me being shallow, but for the purposes of your question—I am into a lot of people right now.”

“Ladies only?”

“Uh,” he’d said. “Uh, yeah. I don’t know. I’m just not crushing on any guy right now, haven’t for a long time. They’re hot, yes, but I don’t want to fuck them, for some weird reason. Honestly, I don’t want to fuck _anyone_ , not even the very hot ladies.”

She’d sighed. “Will. You know you can tell me if you’re still hurting over James.”

“I do,” he had insisted. “I absolutely do. I would’ve told you were that the case, would’ve come over with ice cream and a bottle of rum.”

“Yo ho fucking ho,” she’d muttered under her breath.

“But no, that’s not the case. Sometimes I think it was only Jem for me. Is that crazy? The only guy I ever really wanted, relationship and all, being Jem? I don’t think you’d think that’s crazy, because you’re horny for him now.”

She’d thrown a book at him. “I am not horny for him!”

“Oh, come on, you hedonistic fuck, I see the way you look at him. At family dinner, too! You get bloody hormones all over my food. I can’t have Thai in peace when you and Jem are around. Feel like such a third wheel.”

“Aw,” she’d replied, “get over it, cutie. It’s never gonna happen; Jem’s married to his job at his own law firm, the overachiever. But I don’t think that’s crazy, you only liking Jem. Rare, maybe. Some screwed-up soulmate kinda bullshit.”

And then he’d smiled at her, and he’d been so alive. “Thank you for not thinking I’m mad. For loving me despite everything.”

She had hugged him. “I’ll always love you.”

He was always so alive; how could they just _take him away?_

“America, if needs be,” Jem is saying, when she wakes up. He’s pacing. Will’s on the sofa. She has been covered with a jacket that smells of Will, and is curled up in the comfortable armchair. “Anywhere, if it fixes you. Any treatment, if it means that you shall live.”

It sounds hollow.

“This can’t just—” His voice breaks. He coughs to hide it.

“Yes,” Tessa says, lifting her head from her shoulder. “America. Anywhere.” She doesn’t trust herself to say anything else.

“You agree?” Jem asks, like he’d expected something else. Surprised.

“Of course I do, it’s Will,” she answers. “I need him. _We_ need him.”

“We do need you,” Jem says. “Will. Say something.”

“I just got to know that I am going to die,” Will finally whispers. “Die. Permanently gone. Forever. Ironic, I know, to ask this, but give me a moment or two, because I am going to die.”

“You may not,” Jem tells the room. “That’s what I am suggesting, there must be some treatment. Chemo, maybe. Whatever. Everything has a reason, and hence, everything has a cure. You will not die. I—I forbid it.”

“Jem,” she says, because Will looks like he’s made a decision, some decision, and he’s really the only one in the room who should be talking at the moment, right? Tessa braces herself for something, the air in the room thickening like cheap custard.

Something’s going to happen, and she doesn’t know, but looking at their faces—

“I don’t want fucking chemo,” Will shouts, suddenly, the crack of a gunshot. “This is my death, both of you, I don’t want fucking chemo, I’m fine! I was never going to live forever, and don’t make me, don’t try to stretch it out, drying up in a hospital bed too big for me, dying with drugs in my system, _again_. I cannot do that.”

Jem punches the wall. His fist goes through the drywall. She can feel her heart trying to rip itself apart.

“You’re a coward, James,” Will says, voice shaking, “a coward if you can’t live without me, everyone loses someone.”

*


	3. twenty-seven - thirty-seven

_Questions of science,_

_Science and progress,_

_Do not speak as loud as my heart._

*

It has been exactly a week since that disastrous doctor’s appointment when Will comes into Maellartach. Jem has been looking into hospitals in America specializing in oncology for the whole workday, but when Will pushes open the glass door, he mindlessly switches to a tab which has an email from his counterpart in America, George Lovelace.

“Subject: Places I know of studying cancer cures.” Will reads out. His voice is angry.

Fuck. Wrong email, then. He hasn’t worked for quite some time, and he consciously stops the way his hands tremble when he reaches for the mouse.

“I thought I told you I didn’t want treatment.”

He calmly signs out of his account.

“I thought I made my thoughts on the subject _clear_.”

He clasps his hands together, because they’ll shake again, he knows.

“Say something, god damn it!”

“I cannot lose you,” Jem says trying to keep it even. “I am trying my best. George’s sent over some stuff. He’s handling the Americas well, did you know? Young, very young, twenty-two, if I’m right, but mature for his age. Very good at what he does. I think I remember when I was twenty-two. Three years ago. You remember?”

“Don’t change the subject, Carstairs.”

“What else can I do? I can’t talk about this.”

Will laughs, presses his fingers into Jem’s desk. His warm fingers leave smudges on the glass.

“Why exactly can’t you? Does it hurt? Do you cry? Well, then. Let me talk about it. I have made a decision. Another one. Tessa knows. We’ve talked about it at length.”

“Is she okay with it?” Jem knows, without looking down, that his hands are quivering. He knows that whatever Will says next is something he doesn’t want to hear.

“It’s not her choice to be okay with or not.”

“That’s a no, isn’t it.”

“You know me long enough to not say that, Jem.”

“I know. Just making sure.” He says it quietly, watching Will’s face soften, feeling his own eyes fill with tears. He looks down at his keyboard, away from Will’s blue eyes and expressive face. He cannot.

“I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.”

“Not your fault.”

“I don’t know if it isn’t, now.”

“The choices you make are moulded by your circumstances,” Jem leans back in his office chair, avoids the pity on Will’s face, and stares at the ceiling. “And your circumstances are not your fault. These ones, anyway.”

“No, these certainly aren’t. But I’m sorry because of what I’m going to tell you.”

“Go on.” He feels curiously empty. “Go on. Break my heart.” Jem means it.

“God, the melodrama,” Will sighs. “Promise me you’ll never change.”

 _Promise me._ Such a big thing to say. Such a final thing to say. He knows what Will’s going to say, now, and the idea is so big he cannot fathom it. He can’t move. He can’t breathe, someone help them.

Help them all.

Jem means it. He can feel a part of himself leaving him, wrenching itself away like an amputation, like something worse.

“I’m taking a pill in a couple of weeks. Euthanasia. I can’t let the cancer win.”

Jem has been crying before Will completes the sentence. He has his head in his hands, feels Will walk over, murmuring stuff that’s just apologies. What else can any of them say?

“You’re going to kill yourself,” Jem gasps. “How can you _do this to me?_ ”

“Jem—”

“No!” He sounds horrible, he knows. He sounds like anguish. He feels it, boiling under his skin, more intense than anger and more damaging than sadness. Loss. “You can live, you can live, you can live, and you choose to just leave everything and do you know how much this hurts?”

“I don’t. But I know that I don’t want you to see me like that. I don’t want you to go through that pain. I don’t want you to do all you can and have it all fall short. I know how that feels, and I don’t ever, ever want you to feel like that, Jem, please understand.” He’s gripping Jem’s knees, looking up at Jem’s shaking shoulders. “Please.”

“So you’ll just give up. Do you think it’s easy, d—” He can’t say the word. He can’t think of Will in relation to it. He can’t think.

Will sighs. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

His eyes are bright, too, and they hurt to look at, so Jem squeezes his own shut. “Please,” he begs. “Please let me try.”

“I have a right to this,” Will says, voice steady but aching. “I have a right to realize what I will and will not be able to do in this situation. I have a right to die with dignity, to have the mental stability to tell you I love you before I go. And treatment will never afford me that kindness.”

“A couple of weeks,” Jem breathes out, breaking down.

“I need that kindness. I need to pull my own plug. I need to be that strong. I need you to remember me right. I need you to see me as I was, not as a shade of what I used to be. I need the people I love to grieve for _me_ , not some unmoving, unspeaking body that I left long ago. Give me that, please.”

“I love you,” Jem tells him. “Do you hear me? I love you.”

“I know,” Will says, and Jem knows it’s done. “I’ll love you always.”

*

Jem’s lying on the bed, mock-sulking at the effortless destruction of his masterpiece. Will’s sitting in the middle of the bed, in the pillow fort. She can see his smile because his head is poking out of the roof.

“Hey, darling,” she smiles at him. “Love you.”

They say it to him almost every time they see him, as often as they can. They kiss his forehead and hug him and tangle their legs around his when they go to sleep. They try, so hard, to not lose touch, literally and metaphorically. But she can feel it. Feel the coming change every time she looks at her calendar, looks at the time.

“You need to sleep,” Jem tells him, looking up at him. “An hour or so, Herondale. It’ll do you a world of good. And I’ll have some time without your irritating everything.”

 _You’ll have all your life later_ , Will doesn’t say. Tessa’s grateful for it—he can be so vicious, at times when everything seems like it’s crumbling on him, when he wants to live but the reality of everything slams him in the face, forces him to snarl and scream to try to deal with it. She knows he cannot help it. She knows it’s the only way. But it still hurts.

How can she lose him so early? It feels like an ache lives in her body now, every time she looks up or smiles or does anything. It feels like a venom’s spread through her veins. She stays up late nights, fingers tightly laced through Jem’s as they watch Will sleep, memorize every inch of his face. They can never look away, and Will always sighs when he finds them collapsed by his bedside, sitting in uncomfortable chairs.

They’re at home, but it feels like a hospital visit.

They’ve relocated back to their childhood house, having no use of the scream and wail of the city and its demons. Charlotte and Henry’s ghosts seem to live in the hallways, and Tessa once woke up gasping for Sophie, who was, of course, across the street at the Lightwoods, as married as married could be.

The memories…the memories hurt. They wrap around her, wanting to kill. Nut the worst of all are her recollections from when she was young. She misses those days like something obsessed, like she’s the one with days to live.

She steps in the library and thinks of Will and Dickens.

She goes out onto the roof and thinks of their first kiss.

She goes into the music room and thinks of them all.

_They were so young._

She can’t help but breathe in the air and cry.

“Tessa,” Jem says, and he’s holding her as her knees buckle. Of course he is. Nothing seems to surprise her sometimes.

“Will,” she gasps.

“Asleep.”

“Are you sure? You know he—”

“Yes.”

“I can’t be strong anymore.”

He sighs. “You have to. For him. For me.”

“Don’t ask the impossible of me, James,” Tessa begs. “You always seem to do that.”

*

The room is flooded with sunlight on the last day, as if everything is trying to make it better for Will, as if the world is trying to convince him to live. But Jem knows Will, and sees his decision in everything around him—in the relaxed sprawl of his limbs on the bed, in the way Tess curls into him, in the box on the nightstand with the stuff that’ll kill him.

Jem wishes he could run over and pick up the thing and throw it into some fire, smash it with his fists to never see it again, but then the cancer will kill Will, and it’ll be a more painful death, and Jem doesn’t want Will to ever hurt. He’s already gone through so much.

After every disaster of when they were young, Will got a super-secret job with the security branch of the government. He grew the fuck up, and Jem was just left looking as their lives became crazily different even when they converged so often—Will had probably shoehorned his very James Bond department into only going with Maellartach whenever they needed legal help. Will could do stuff like that.

Will also never dated, claimed he was over love. Tessa thought that was a whole load of bullshit, and Jem had always had this guilt sitting heavy on his chest about being the guy who broke Will’s heart so badly he could never love again. It may be narcissistic, thinking that he could do that to a person, but Jem could find no other explanation for why a person who lived life for love would just give it all up like that.

There was also the thing about Will’s job being the kind of time-consuming that should be illegal. There were no fixed hours, he’d come back home bleeding and would need Tessa to wrap him up because Jem wasn’t good with wounds and blood for some fucking reason. Maybe he didn’t date because the hours he kept weren’t exactly the best to maintain any kind of a relationship. Maybe he didn’t date because his job was insanely dangerous and losing him would destroy his significant other. Will could be caring like that.

Jem doesn’t want to have to see this. He doesn’t think he’ll make it through okay.

“James,” Tessa says, voice weak. “Come over?”

“Don’t have all the time in the world,” Will finishes, and he has the audacity to be smiling, still, even as a tear rolls down his face.

Jem walks over to the side of the bed, and sits down on the chair placed by it. He knows the bed’s big enough for three, and that Will would want him to be close now, as the sun sets and everything, but he cannot do it. It’s like he’s tied down with some vile magic that makes him something…else. He knows that he’s only grieving, but it feels so terrible. It feels like he’s a different person now, like he’s watched Will live his life at a distance.

“Bad time for jokes,” he tells Will.

“Ah, well.” Will closes his eyes, sighs. “I guess I knew that.”

“Of course,” Tessa smiles tremulously. “God, I’ll miss you.”

“Don’t go,” Jem says, and turns away from Will’s expression because he cannot see it. It must be pitying. “Don’t…”

He gets up from the chair, faces the window while picking up the violin from its open case. He can’t ask that of Will, can’t ask him to suffer, to stay for Jem. He can’t be that selfish. So he plays, and the strings bite into his fingers because he’s holding on too tight. He doesn’t look at Jem or Tessa, keeps his eyes screwed shut even though he knows these are the last few moments he’ll ever see them together—he’s too weak. He can’t ache any more than he already does; he feels like he’ll fall apart, and he can’t do that to Will.

So he plays, and the wood is smooth and almost slippery against his skin because he can’t quite concentrate—but he makes sure the music sounds beautiful, and it does, it _does_ , and he doesn’t like thinking that it does because Will is going to die. Nothing should be beautiful on a day like this. The sky should’ve been black in the morning, the colour of mourning, the flowers should’ve wilted the ugliest brown, and all should’ve been silent.

The piece ends then, because the day was as lovely as a day could be, a bouquet lies on the table, and Jem can hear the music still. It feels like it’ll play in his head forever. 

“What’re you calling it?”

Jem looks over at his brimming eyes, still the most vibrant shade of blue he’s ever seen. It’s a stupid question, but a necessary one. “I don’t know.” _Tell me_ , he wants to say. He knows that he’ll do the unadvisable thing and just name it after Will, but it would be nice to have another option that wasn’t quite as painful.

“Guess you’ll find out later,” he says, and raises a hand to his face to wipe the tears away before he stretches to pick up the box on the bedside table. “Don’t cry, Tessa.”

“I love you,” she only says, and her voice chokes with it.

“I love you,” Jem tells Will, and they’re the same now, both of them. They can do absolutely _nothing_ , but love him and feel it tear their heart apart.

“I love both of you so much,” he says to them, and his eyes are so blue, _so blue_ , and Jem will never see them again. The pill is stark white. Such a small thing to do so much. “Miss you already.”

And then he smiles, and Jem sobs. “See you on the other side,” he says, and it ends.

*

_Tell me you love me,_

_Come back and haunt me,_

_Oh, and I rush to the start._

*

After the end, Tessa knows one thing: He had loved her.

The last will and testament of William Herondale was read out in Jem’s office, by one of the firm’s senior lawyers. “So, to make it simpler, Mr. Herondale left each of you two letters, along with all his possessions, including his, uh, apartment,” the guy had said at the end. “He asks some of his money to be given to a rehabilitation centre, and the rest to be divided between the two of you, to use as you see fit.”

“Letters,” Tessa had said immediately. Jem hadn’t said anything for days. He’d taken his and left the room.

In the present, Tessa can feel the paper under her fingers. It’s heavy, fancy stock. Will had written with a leaking fountain pen. She can almost imagine him bent over a desk. She can’t imagine when, though. They’d kept him so close after he’d told them there were two weeks.

He wrote it before that. Which means he’d planned it all out. She smooths the paper over, and reads it yet again.

_Dear Tessa,_

_A guy once told me I wouldn’t live beyond nineteen. He was only eight years off on the calculations, but I’ll forgive him that mistake. What are eight years, anyway, to someone like you? I swear you’re immortal, darling angel. You haven’t aged a day; sometimes when I see you, I can see the girl who you used to be and the teenager you were. I miss those days, but more the idea of them than their cold reality. But why waste ink on sad things?_

_I love you; you should know this. You should know this before I finish this letter, because I thought that I would write that at the very end, to make it more dramatic and miserable. But I have so much to tell you that I might’ve forgotten, and that would not be tolerated. Okay. I’ll tell you why I am telling you something that you already know so early on in this letter. This is something you are getting after I am dead—shouldn’t I tell you all my little secrets, all the little strings I pulled that you never knew of? Shouldn’t I reveal things?_

_Sorry, my life’s been really boring. Nothing hidden, and hence, nothing to reveal._

_So: I love you I love you I love you. I love you now, as I write this, and I’ll love you later, and I’ll love you at the end, and I’ll love you After. I know it. I am probably over your shoulder at the moment, smelling the scent of your hair, curling in the damp London weather, wanting to touch you. Wherever I am, know that I am just fine. Not lonely at all. After you’ve read this letter, I’ll undoubtedly go and attempt to talk to Bowie._

_(Pray that I get through the hordes of other, less awesome ghosts who also want to talk to him.)_

_I have always loved you. You have been my North Star and my weakness, the strength in my armour and the break in my heart. You are to me what I could never tell you. By the time I realized my feelings for what they were, it was the very definition of too late. I’m so sorry—I am not talking of that ill-advised whatever we had when we were in our foolish teens. I am talking about my whole life after that. I had always loved you, even after we stopped our ‘relationship’ because it was not one._

_I had loved Jem, too. I convinced myself that the love I had for one of you must be platonic. Had to be. After all, who could love romantically two people at the same time? Who could feel like they were being ripped apart if they had one person at one time, and one person only? It was unheard of. I wrapped that part of myself away, and since we had just broken romantic ties, convinced myself that I loved you only as a brother loves his sister, and that Jem was my Lucie Manette._

_Forcing myself to think that has been the hardest thing I have ever done and one of my many failures._

_I am so sorry to have burdened both of you with this, but…what else could I have done? Keeping it from you has proved to be so terrible and aching, but both of you are in love with each other, and it is a joy to see that. Greater than anything, and I would’ve happily hidden my love for both of you forever if it meant that you could be happy._

_Forever is a long time, but I would have seen it through for you._

_I love you both to death. Beyond. Present, past, future tense. Whatever time or space or infinity you can imagine, I love you there and then. And I know I should’ve told you this an age ago, but I was so scared that you would think me twisted, ugly. I could not have taken that. I’m sorry that I was not stronger. I’m sorry for so many things, and no doubt I should’ve spent my life repenting for all of it, no doubt I should’ve allowed you the chance to love me, no doubt I’m a fool—but know that I’m your fool._

_So: last wishes – nothing much, really. My life, in my living of it, has been all I could have wished for. You and Jem have been something I couldn’t ever have dreamed up. I want you to be happy. Both of you. I know you have feelings for each other. I know you would’ve squashed them away under formality and other funereal things had I not intervened. I know you wouldn’t have looked at each other, needlessly shamed by the way you couldn’t read my emotions. Stop that. Right now. Go out on a date, immediately._

_Be nice to each other. I’ll be there with you, always, and I’ll respect any decisions you might make._

_I love you._

_Will_

Jem walks in the room just as she finishes it, tears in her eyes, a drop on the paper. He’s teary himself, holding his own letter in his hands carefully, as if it might shatter. He sits on the chair facing Tessa’s. “Morbid for a first date, isn’t this.”

Tessa smiles at him through her tears. “I think Will knew us well enough to know we were never normal.”

“I miss him.”

“God, I miss him.”

*

“America, James!” She’s smiling, and Jem straightens one of the tchotchkes on the desk of the first Spiral Labyrinth on the West Coast. It’s a tiny Funko Pop of Harry Potter, because Tessa likes the series, even though she hates the fact that the epilogue exists.

“They should’ve been allowed to have different lives,” she had ranted. “Less foreseeable lives, dear God, they saved the world, and what are they doomed to? Boring sub-plots and tedious, predicted baby names, what the hell.” Jem finds her outbursts adorable, but he might be the tiniest bit biased.

Just the tiniest bit.

“Never thought this would get here,” she muses softly, and it is only the fact that there is no one else in the store that enables him to hear it.

“Come on,” he scoffs, and she smiles wider. Her brown hair falls in perfect waves down her back when she lets it out of the updo it has been in to keep it out of her way while they set the store up. It’s a tradition, kind of: the first Spiral Labyrinth in a new country is always one she sets up herself, and this is a tough one, this is the big one. The place is huge, and black and white bookshelves have been stacked up everywhere—along the walls, in neat rows on the floor. The café part of the store has been made cosy and homey with squashy armchairs, comfortable sofas and rugs thick enough to be apt for sleeping on. “Labyrinth has been doing phenomenally since day one, of course you got here. And America’s not that big of a deal anyway.”

“Shut up, Mr Big Shot Lawyer,” she says. “It’s a big deal to _me_.”

“The world shouldn’t be a big deal for you,” he tells her, and grins when she rolls her eyes fondly. “You deserve so much more.”

“Aww, love you babe,” Tessa says as she rips open a carton violently. The tear of cardboard is loud and her glee is palpable as she examines the contents. Jem walks over, and sure enough, it’s the special shipment of the signed Shadowhunter books.

“All three?”

“Of course,” she answers, distracted by the pretty covers. “Oh hey, there’s a note!”

_The books with the black ribbons on them are gifts for you, Tessa; Ragnor wishes you well, Catarina wants to meet you for dinner at this sushi place we like, and I think you’re doing amazing._

_P.S. Yeah, yeah, I’ll do the exclusive release for Silver Statue at Spiral Labyrinth. You don’t have to ask. And anytime you need anything, we’ve got the country at our feet._

_Kisses, Magnus_

Jem likes Magnus, has done so ever since he read one of his first biographies. Magnus is young, and writes like he has nothing to lose. Jem didn’t know someone could do both fantasy and non-fiction before him. His personal favourite is Ragnor Fell, though; and he is not to be blamed, because _workplace, americana, i_ is a revelation. It’s the best piece of literature he’s read in a while, and he would die for it, which is why his favourite is Ragnor Fell.

“So, are we going to meet the Three Musketeers?” he asks, and Tessa looks up.

“That nickname is to be kept between the publishers and the distributors,” she says in a monotone before perking up, “I think we might. Sushi sounds nice, and now that Magnus can legally drink, you can introduce him to your wines.”

“I refuse to believe he wasn’t drinking before this,” he picks up a few books from the carton and lays them out, a glittering array that would bring bookworms to the place like metal to a magnet, “I know he turned twenty-one this year, but I’m sure he was drinking before this.”

“He wouldn’t’ve survived otherwise,” she sighs, “celebrity is a crazy thing, but let me maintain the illusion of Magnus following laws in my head.”

“Catarina loves that illusion. Nerds, both of you.” He shoves a hand into his jeans pocket, and his skin brushes the warm metal of the ring. Her ring. He bought it a year ago when he was on the way back to their apartment. He’d been walking back, for some reason, and the store had caught his eye.

He’d walked in on impulse, and walked out with a ring. It had seemed so perfect, sparkling bright enough to hold his attention for at least two whole minutes before the guy behind the counter coughed discreetly, reminding him that he had to say something and not seem like a crazy person. So he had bought it, and had walked back to the office to hide it because he couldn’t have Tessa finding it randomly. He’d been home late, but he’d fobbed it off by saying that there was some important stuff he got stuck with from the US branch, and oh fuck, he cannot believe he’s going to do this.

He remembers when Will had left them those letters three years ago, and his letter had, among other things, told him that Tessa liked him, a lot, and that he would be stupid for just letting her go. _Don’t make my mistakes_ , Will had written, _you’re too pretty to do that_.

Tessa had said they should give it a try, and they had, and Jem had felt faintly blessed, because how many people can say that the person they’ve been in love for roughly their whole life likes them back? And then during them getting to know each other romantically, Jem had gotten to know a different part of her, which, yes, obviously he did, but it changed him, because he knew Tessa as a person who was someone other than the girl he was in love with.

He knew Tessa as…Tessa, the warmth of her skin when he curled up next to her late at night, her nose in a book in the early morning light, ice-cream down her shirt because she was laughing too hard, the lights in her hair as they stood together on a bridge.

Doing it today, with the light flooding in through the huge glass doors from the busy streets outside—it’s the same feeling that Jem had felt buying the ring. It feels _right_. He doesn’t know why, and he doesn’t know how, but he always chalks it up to Will, wherever that fuck is. He thinks that Will’s guiding him, helping him make good decisions, and the thought’s ironic, but it’s not implausible.

 _If you’re here,_ he thinks, _if you’re here, I love you. Also, don’t fucking laugh if this goes sideways_.

He’s doing this. The ground is cool through the denim as he sinks to one knee, and she looks up at the rustle it makes and stops short, her eyes going large and shocked.

“Tessa,” he says, and they fill with tears, immediately, and he curses in his head because if she starts crying, he’s not going to be able to be stoic for long, and that’s going to ruin whatever he has in his head, “I’ve known you forever, and loved you, I think, for more than that, and I know time is nothing but I really do think I will not be able to live the rest of all I have without you knowing that.”

“Jem,” she whispers, and she’s smiling as a tear makes its way down her cheek.

“I miss you whenever you’re in the other room, and I seem to need you, all the time, and I know that can just be me being needy and dependent but it might also mean something else, you know? I want you for all the adventures we’ll never have, and all of those we will, and I want you to tell me I’m being stupid forever, and I just want a thousand of all of this that we have. Maybe I’m being greedy, but if I would do anything, would go anywhere, if I could have it—if I could have _you—_ ”

“You always had me,” she cuts in, and it’s so definite it shocks him. But then maybe it shouldn’t have, Tessa was always more intelligent than him.

“I love you,” he announces, and his voice is thick. Damn it. He holds the open ring box up higher. Maybe that’ll be a distraction? “Will you marry me?”

“Yes,” she says.

*

“Will, I _swear to God_ ,” she exclaims, and her kid looks back at her, grins. She’s got Jem’s hair and she’s got Tessa’s jaw, but damn it all to hell if Tessa doesn’t see Will Herondale in the curve of her smile. Tessa will never quite know how she got it, but maybe it’s the oil painting in their library (yes, and honest-to-goddamn _oil painting_ , let no one tell you that Jem Carstairs isn’t dramatic, Will probably would’ve laughed himself to tears if he could see it) or it’s the stories they’ve told her since she could understand them and long before that or what Jem says has some merit to it and Will’s been haunting them benevolently forever.

Moments like these, with her running through the house and Tessa running behind her, she thinks it’s definitely the Will-Is-A-Ghost-Don’t-You-See-It theory.

“Kit’s room!” she shrieks and Tessa sighs.

“Kit is going to be here in forty-five minutes, so wait for him, would you?”

Wilhelmina stops abruptly, and turns, her eyes going huge and liquid in that way only she can manage, an expert emotional manipulation, and Tessa knows to be wary of it, even if her girl is only seven years old.

“But Kit’s _sad_ ,” she says, and Tessa melts, instantly, because that voice is too cute, and she was never good at resisting large eyes. But wait, what exactly is she saying?

“—He misses his friend all the time and he tries so hard to not be sad but he is sad.” Tessa stares as she folds her small arms across her chest, her hair curling into her eyes. “Which is why I wanna decorate his room for him.”

Oh. It’s the Tiberius Blackthorn thing. Tessa sighs again, and bends so that they’re eye to eye, cocks her head to the right, and stamps down on the urge to smile as Mina copies the movement. They definitely named her right.

“I know you want to help him,” she says, “and that’s nice of you. But if you put streamers everywhere like you did a few months ago, we will have to have a talk.”

She giggles.

“It’s not funny! There was crepe everywhere, and glitter. Magnus, while the best cool uncle you could ever hope for, is not someone whose every word you should be treasuring like the Bible. Do not do that. Poor Kit had to tear crepe out of his clothes, and no one knows it got there.”

“ _I_ know,” Mina says, and volunteers no further information. They _definitely_ named her right.

“So, ground rules: no crepe, no glitter, minimal mess, and please don’t make the boy cry. Or scream. And call if you need any help—” she tells her, but the girl’s already off like a shot.

“Those are abysmal boundaries you’ve set,” says an amused voice, and she turns to see Jem smiling near the windows. “She can do literally anything, and she’s got your permission.”

“That is not how it works,” she objects uselessly, and walks towards him.

“Really, honey? You still believe that?” He raises an eyebrow and she slumps against him.

“Ugh, stop poking holes in my logic.”

“Babe.” His voice is warm, and she smiles into his skin. “There is no logic in your optimism.”

“I can hope! I should be allowed to hope!”

“Not with Mina Carstairs,” he answers. “There is no hope, there is only crepe and despair. I often wonder who introduced her to decoration, and ask the Universe for reasons why.”

“When you get an answer, inform me,” she groans, and she knows he’s smiling that small, warm smile he always smiles when talking about their child.

“Yes ma’am.”

“Stop making fun of me. I’ve had a long day. Where does she get all that energy from, it’s terrible.”

“It’s Will. All him.”

“We can’t just pin everything we don’t know on Will,” she looks up at Jem, and he shrugs.

“I’m pretty sure we can, Tess. Pretty sure that’s what he would’ve wanted. Wills apart, though: what was all that about Kit being sad?”

“Uh,” she grimaces. “I’m sure it’s very personal and all, but everyone has picked up on it, really. It’s about the Blackthorn boy. The second-youngest one, I think.”

“Ty Blackthorn,” Jem interjects. “Julian’s brother? The Julian who works with George Lovelace to head US Maellartach?”

“The very same. He moved to the UK recently to become a content editor at some hot-shot company, but mostly to teach and research mass comms at the Scholomance.”

“Wasn’t he a Youtuber? Did a lot of videos with Kit, if I’m not wrong…”

His face is so earnest and open and worried that it hits her smack in her chest with how much she loves him, leaves her metaphorically breathless. Jem’s not wrong, and she knows because he watches every video from Kit’s channel religiously. He doesn’t need to, the boy’s pretty famous on the platform, but he still does, even when he doesn’t understand the lingo and is always anxious whenever he does some challenge. It’s such a Dad thing for him to do, and she finds it adorable.

“Yes, and he stopped making videos, and I suspect talking to Kit properly after he did so, which leads to our dandelion being miserable. And maybe this is just me and three-quarters of the internet digging for irrelevant homoerotic subtext, but we all think that there was something more.”

“Like…super-romantic mutual pining more?” Jem looks thoughtful, his forehead scrunching up minutely.

“Maybe? There’s so many theories, but everyone agrees on the fact that Ty wouldn’t just up and leave like that without something having gone wrong.”

“I mean, I saw the videos,” he says slowly. “And I can see why people might think that, they are cute together, and they always had a chemistry. But if Tiberius just up and _ran_ , that’s cowardly, and he doesn’t deserve Kit.”

“Don’t be so quick to judge,” Tessa admonishes. “I know we’re firmly Team Christopher Herondale here, but we don’t have the full story. Maybe Kit was the one who fucked up, and you think no one’s good enough for your kids anyway.”

“Am I wrong?” he asks, and she laughs, stands up on the tips of her toes to press a feather-light kiss to his lips.

“Maybe not,” she admits, “but you’ve got to give them a chance, I guess. Remember, Kit’s a big boy. He’ll sort his stuff out on his own.”

“He’s _nineteen_ ,” Jem scoffs. “What stuff could we sort out at nineteen? We needed help for everything, we were messes.”

“Yeah, but kids these days are different. I think.”

“They need help.” Jem’s tone is so very decided. “Wanna matchmake?”

She raises an eyebrow, because wow, that’s a surprise. “Is that Will Herondale’s influence I hear?” she teases.

He beams. “I don’t know, but I am very sure that Will would’ve recognized the need for some good-old setting up in this situation. Or just some good-old pestering Kit to call his friend. Whatever works.”

“You’re _such_ a Dad,” she tells him, and well. It’s been eight years since they got married, and so many lifetimes since they fell in love, but the sparkle in his eyes still makes her knees go weak.

“I just don’t want him hurt,” he drops a kiss on her forehead. “He used to be so sad, all the time…I don’t want those expressions on his face ever again if I can help it.”

She knows how that feels. She remembers young Kit, remembers meeting him seven years ago, a twelve-year old with anger on his skin and tears in his eyes. She’d wanted to shelter him immediately, give him some form of permanence that the world never gave him. It had been Mina who’d decided it in the end, barely a year old.

She’d stretched a chubby fist towards him and Tessa had looked on as Kit had had allowed her to hold a finger, had looked at her like she was some precious artefact worth millions. He’d jerked back from her in a second, looking guiltily up at Jem and Tessa like he’d made some sort of mistake, and Mina had bawled at the separation, and so it was done.

From then on, he was her favourite new toy forever, and they had watched as Kit had slowly realized that the world was a better place than he’d thought it was. It had taken him a lot of time to become who he was today, and Tessa did not want him to go through more hurt than he already had.

“I guess we can always try,” she grins, because this is going to be so much fun.

And Jem, because he is literally the most devious person ever under that calm veneer, and she is so glad to have him at her side, says, “I’ll talk to some of my contacts at YouTube, then.”

*

_Running in circles,_

_Chasing our tails,_

_Coming back as we are._

*

“Hey,” he says. “It’s been eleven years. If you were here, you’d be thirty-six.” He lets out an incredulous laugh. “I can’t imagine you that old, I really cannot. I can’t see beyond laugh lines; you know? Around your eyes. I was always the least imaginative of the three of us, but I think your eyes would still have remained blue…would always have remained blue. God, how I miss you. I guess wishing you were here is really quite redundant, but I do. Wish you were here. Physically, I mean.”

Tessa leans into him in the silence. “We’ve been married eight years,” she continues. “Long time, but it never quite feels like that. But times like these, I remember just how long you never were with us. I wish you were here so I could kiss you, feel your heart beat, and I have a confession to make: I’m scared of the day when I’ll forget your voice. All of the lovely things you said. I wish we could’ve known all of what you never told us. I wish things didn’t have to be as difficult as they were. As they are.”

They’re sitting near Will’s grave, and she gives the headstone a crooked smile, her fingers caressing the cold stone the W’s engraved in. Jem kisses her shoulder because he can see her eyes fill, as they always do after she’s said a few words. His vision has been blurry since all of this started, but they’ll be okay.

“Wilhelmina’s growing up so fast it scares me the smallest bit,” he admits. “She’s like you. She likes you, likes all the stories so much, and she’s becoming a little mastermind. It’s amazing. You’d have spoiled her rotten if you were here, I think. And I know you’re going to scold us for naming her Wilhelmina, you’ll say that its too long a name to be respectable, damn the fact that she’s named after you.”

“She’s seven, get over it, Herondale,” Tessa laughs, and it’s watery. “It makes for a lot of nicknames. Mina is Jem’s favourite. He says it’s the cutest. I think Hel is most appropriate, but I’m saving that one for her teenage years. I bet she’s going to be a horror. Super polite dark-haired babies, you had said. Shows what you knew, you dumb shit. She smiles just like you.”

“She really does,” he says softly, letting the memories in his head, the glint in Will’s blue eyes, the white of his teeth, the curve of his lips. “It has that rascal quality to it. And Kit’s gone and fallen in love, that emotional mess. You’d approve of how stupid he’s being. I’m so worried he’ll get hurt, but Tessa told me that he should go through all that and that I cannot wrap my kids up in bubble wrap.”

“He’s such a Dad,” Tessa says. “I don’t know if you’d approve of it or not, because he’s _really_ protective. I don’t know what I’m going to do when Mina grows up. Or when Kit brings the Blackthorn boy home. It’s going to be such a colossal mess.”

“Shut up,” Jem nudges her away from the headstone and traces his fingers over the dates. “I’m the perfect amount of protective. And the perfect amount of Dad. And I still love you, Will.”

“I still love you, Will,” Tessa whispers, and he knows if he turns her cheeks are going to be wet, same as his. “We love you.”

“We love you,” he says.

*

It’s a quiet world. It is like this—Tessa Gray lives in holy matrimony with James Carstairs in a house which they have made theirs after over a decade of being together. Will Herondale waits for them across the divide of death and lives in their thoughts and dreams as their love, and he is nothing if not patient.

However, this was never a tale about the waiting. Their daughter lives with them, named after their late love, and she is growing older, thinking of becoming someone. Their son meets them every so often with his gold-bright hair and his shining eyes. It’s a peaceful world, a nice one to live in, to love in, subtly expensive. This was never a tale about inflation, though.

Tessa is thirty-seven, and still adorable. Wavy brown hair, rose-pink cheeks, grey eyes that seem to be colour-changing (magic eyes, Jem has called them since he was a child), and a way of making the world flower around her with her easy smiles and soft words. Just utterly adorable. Tessa likes slow, calming music—Edith Piaf’s a particular favourite. Her best friend in all the whole wide world is Jem: where she goes, he follows and vice versa.

Will was a beautiful boy, not a child, never really a child, so lovely it hurt to look at him—blue eyes so clear and striking they brought tears, lush dark hair soft to the touch, always moving, always talking. Will had liked justice—made a career of it, in fact—and pretty melodies that only he could hear sometimes. And the great truth of his life was that he had loved Tessa and Jem more than anything in his life, and they had loved him back, but he had never known it, and nor had they. 

Jem Carstairs has black hair, which has strands of silver through it now, high cheekbones and eyes so black one could drown in them. He’s thirty-eight and so calm it’s unsettling; even Tessa has her rages. He keeps everything in order and likes confetti and smiles at everyone but his smiles for his best friend are the brightest. He can play almost every instrument but refuses to play the piano, says all the good pianists died young; he sings Mandarin lullabies to his children when they don’t want to sleep.

There are the others, too, but most of them aren’t of any consequence to this, and the story has to go on, doesn’t it?

*

_Nobody said it was easy,_

_Oh, it's such a shame for us to part._

_Nobody said it was easy,_

_No one ever said it would be so hard._

_I'm going back to the start._

_\- The Scientist, Coldplay_

**Author's Note:**

> Hope you liked this! I'm @crimson-noir on tumblr.


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